Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.

You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs―the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limbs, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate―the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.

I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.

Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing... I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.

No difference exists between American and European manners. A proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke.

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.

- Might it console you to know that I expect nothing but torture from her return? That I regard you as a bird of paradise? She shook her head. - That my admiration for you is painfully strong? - I want Van – she cried – and not intangible admiration. - Intangible? You goose. You my gauge it, you may brush it once very lightly with the knuckles of you gloved hand. I said knuckles. I said once. That will do. I can't kiss you. Not even your burning face. Good-bye, pet. Tell Edmond to take a nap after he returns. I shall need him at two in the morning.