Idleness breeds our better virtues.

...thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art...If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.

Let the past abolish the past when -- and if -- it can substitute something better.

Success is feminine and like a woman, if you cringe before her, she will override you