“I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort.”

I take up my own pen again – the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles.

Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.

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.

However fragmented the world, however intense the national rivalries, it is an inexorable fact that we become more interdependent every day.

Do you think the Voice would come to me? I would that every one could hear the Voice as I hear it.

In every battle there comes a time when both sides consider themselves beaten, then he who continues the attack wins.

I’m changing every day as far as this rap thing. I’m learning new things. I’m getting bigger by the day.

Every man gives his life for what he believes … one life is all we have to live and we live it according to what we believe.

Memory is a great artist. For every man and for every woman it makes the recollection of his or her life a work of art and an unfaithful record.

Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.