“The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement.”

It seems hard that a man in his need could be so flouted by a road.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.

Truth; that long clean clear simple undeniable unchallengeable straight and shining line, on one side of which black is black and on the other white is white, has now become an angle, a point of view.

The next time you try to seduce anyone, don’t do it with talk, with words.

The quality an artist must have is objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to kid himself about it.

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

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.

Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.

Love doesn’t die; the men and women do.

The salvation of the world is in man’s suffering.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

The most important thing is insight, that is to be-curiosity-to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does, and if you have that, then I don’t think the talent makes much difference, whether you’ve got it or not.

Yes. A man will talk about how he’d like to escape from living folks. But it’s the dead folks that do him the damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.

To describe something as being black and white means it is clearly defined. Yet when your ethnicity is black and white, the dichotomy is not that clear. In fact, it creates a grey area.

This theory [the oxygen theory] is not as I have heard it described, that of the French chemists, it is mine (elle est la mienne); it is a property which I claim from my contemporaries and from posterity.

One feels ‘the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech’ in trying to describe things intangible.

Fear is often described as False Evidence Appearing Real.

I just think the American people had expected that the president of the United States would be able to describe what he’s going to do in the next four years. But he can’t. He can’t even explain what he’s done in the last four years.

My doctrine is as I’ve described, which is confidence in our cause, clarity in our purpose, and resolve in our might.

But I know also that still more interesting discoveries will be made that I have not the imagination to describe – and I am awaiting them, full of curiosity and enthusiasm.

I have come to see the nonsense of attempting to describe fine scenery. There is no such possibility. If scenery could be adequately reproduced in words, there would have been no need of God’s making it in reality.