A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation.

Because I actively enjoy sleeping, dreams, the unexplainable dialogues that take place in my head as I am drifting off, all that, I tell myself that lying down to an afternoon nap that goes on and on through eternity is not something to be concerned about. What spoils this pleasant fancy is the recollection that when people are dead they don't read books. This I find unbearable.

Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door).

It's deprivation that makes people writers, if they have it in them to be a writer.

The nail doesn't choose the time or the circumstances in which it is drawn to the magnet

If I had had to write only about imaginary people, I would have had to close up my typewriter. I wrote about my life in less and less disguise as I grew older, and finally with no disguise - except the disguise we create for ourselves, which is self-deception.

A gentleman doesn't have one set of manners for the house of a poor man and another for the house of someone with an income incomparable to his own.