Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.
It’s a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.
They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurance of our identities?
Yes: but aren’t love and marriage notoriously synonymous in the minds of most women? Certainly very few men get the first without promising the second: love, that is–if it’s just a matter of spreading her legs, almost any woman will do that for nothing.
The most dangerous thing in the world is to make a friend of an Englishman, because he’ll come sleep in your closet rather than spend 10 shillings on a hotel.
