One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.

I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.

Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.

All good art is in the nature of a letter written to amuse a sick friend. Too much art, particularly in our time, is only a letter written to oneself.

The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have; Not universal love But to be loved alone.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.