“Nothing is so musical as the sound of pouring bourbon for the first drink on a Sunday morning. Not Bach or Schubert or any of those masters.”

I have never gone to a doctor in my adult life, feeling instinctively that doctors meant either cutting or, just as bad, diet.

The dimensions of a work of art are seldom realized by the author until the work is accomplished. It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses.

There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries.

But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word He spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.

Owing to the fact he was a mute they were able to give him all the qualities they wanted him to have.

And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.

Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone.

People, unless they are nilly-willy or very sick, cannot be taken into the hands and be changed overnight into somthing more worth-while and profitable.

We no longer fear the age-old haunting questions: “Who am I?” “Why am I?” “Where am I going?” – and having cast out fear, we can be honest and charitable.

I meditated on love and reasoned it out. I realized what is wrong with us. Men fall in love for the first time. And what do they fall in love with? …They fall in love with a woman. They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax.

The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.

I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.

Imagination takes humility, love and great courage.

Next to music beer was best.

A seed grows in writing as in nature. The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.

As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.