“I’ve always expected the worst, and it’s always worse than I expected.”

if you are going to be pushed you had better jump

To myself – today – I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.

I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.

All intimacies are based on differences.

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

If this was love, love had been overrated.

To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live.

To establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one’s own.

Make the short story tremendously succinct – with a very short pulse or rhythm – and the closest selection of detail.

Don’t pass it by – the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for.

Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else.

There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.

When you forget to eat, you know you’re alive.

Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.

Deep experience is never peaceful.

People expect a nice period piece, but that’s not always the case. There’s a deep human mystery in his work.

Every single thing is like a new thing, so it’s never what I expect.

I don’t expect that because I was successful in one field that I will then get a ride of passage into another.

Never expect anything, ye will never be demoralized.

People automatically assume and expect that every moment and every bit of personal data should be broadcasted on social media, especially as it relates to them – and thats just not cuttin’ it for me.

You can’t expect people to do the right thing or else they will go to hell. We are already in hell!.

The public is accustomed to it, expects little from it and therefore takes little notice of it.

They can’t expect anyone to actually pay for a shirt that says, ‘I (picture of an elephant) the San Diego Zoo.’ What does that even mean?