“After the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.”

The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.

Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.

Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work – that’s what makes you unique.

The only way to kill death is through photography.

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

Continue reading Proust. His magnificent intelligence is particularly fond of describing stupidity. Which is ultimately exhausting.

Love is mainly an affair of short spasms. If these spasms disappoint us, love dies. It is very seldom that it weathers the experience and becomes friendship.

When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.

Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don’t like – then cultivate it. That’s the only part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.

Picasso said that everything is a miracle, that it’s a miracle that we don’t dissolve in our baths.

I feel myself inhabited by a force or being — very little known to me. It gives the orders; I follow.

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel.

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.

The misery of keeping a dog is his dying so soon. But, to be sure, if he lived for fifty years and then died, what would become of me?

Failure is delay, but not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead-end street.

If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don’t keer if you die at dusk. It’s so many people never seen de light at all.

Flying off the handle sometimes causes hammers and humans to lose their heads, as well as their effectiveness.

And I can’t die easy thinking maybe the menfolks white or black is making a spit cup out of you. Have some sympathy for me. Put me down easy, Janie, I’m a cracked plate.

He said you were the only one who was bitter about S’s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving.

We don’t actually fear death, we fear that no one will notice our absence, that we will disappear without a trace.

She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.