I’m not clear enough in the head to feel anything but varieties of dull anger and arrows of sadness.

Ruin, weariness, death, perpetually death, stand grimly to confront the other presence of Elizabethan drama which is life: life compact of frigates, fir trees and ivory, of dolphins and the juice of July flowers, of the milk of unicorns and panthers’ breath, of ropes of pearl, brains of peacocks and Cretan wine.

Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read; what I haven't read.

Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become.

more and more I come to loathe any dominion of one over another; any leadership, any imposition of the will.

I mean it's the writing, not the being read, that excites me.

Marvelous are the innocent.