A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.

When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.

The poets are wrong of course […] But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.

She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do.

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian

Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar.