In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior. In America, it's an excuse for a form of behavior.

Even sound seemed to fail in this air, like the air was worn out with carrying sounds so long.

I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o'clock every day.

Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.

. . .in August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and---from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone. . .the title reminded me of that time, of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization.

So long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice.

I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.