1. “All things come to him who mates.”
2. “An idea ran back and forward in his head like a blind man, knocking over the solid furniture.”
3. “An unread book is just a block of paper.”
4. “Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own jokes.”
5. “Either you think—or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”
6. ”Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.”
7. “Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.”
8. “Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.”
9. “If all your clothes are worn to the same state, it means you go out too much.”
10. “I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self-respect and it's these things I'd believe in even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all she should be...I love her and that's the beginning of everything.”
11. “In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.”
12. “Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”
13. “No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.”
14. “No such thing as a man willing to be honest -- that would be like a blind man willing to see.”
15. “Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you - like music to the musician . . . - or else it is nothing, an empty, formalised bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.”
16. “Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.”
17. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
18. “Strange is it not? That of the myriads who before us pass'd the Door of darkness through, not one returns to tell us of the road, which to discover, we must travel to.”
19. “The Idyl passed... But, knowing they had had the best of love, they clung to what remained. Love lingered-- by way of long conversations at night...by way of deep and intimate kindnesses they developed toward each other, by way of their laughing at the same absurdities and thinking the same things noble and the same things sad.”
20. “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
21. “To write it, it took three months; to conceive it --three minutes; to collect the data in it -- all my life.”
22. “Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist, but in the ability to start over.”
23. “Writers aren't exactly people...they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person.”
24. “You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.”
25. “You really ought to read more books - you know, those things that look like blocks but come apart on one side.”
