“What liars poets and everybody were! They made one think one wanted sentiment. When what one supremely wanted was this piercing, consuming, rather awful sensuality.”

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

A little morphine in all the air. It would be wonderfully refreshing for everyone.

What one does in one’s art, that is the breath of one’s being. What one does in one’s life, that is a bagatelle for the outsiders to fuss about.

When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos.

You can’t insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it.

She would have thought a woman would have died of shame. Instead of which, the shame died.

I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.

This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us.

A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board

But humanity never gets beyond the caterpillar stage -it rots in the chrysalis, it never will have wings.It is anti-creation, like monkeys and baboons.

Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

Only youth has a taste of immortality.

But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself.

The truthful man is usually a liar.

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

Yet do not miss the moral, my good men. For Saint Paul says that all that’s written well Is written down some useful truth to tell. Then take the wheat and let the chaff lie still.

He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.

A statesman is an easy man, he tells his lies by rote. A journalist invents his lies, and rams them down your throat. So stay at home and drink your beer and let the neighbors vote.

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

Though leaves are many, the root is one; Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun Now I may wither into the truth.

The life of a coquette is one constant lie; and the only rule by which you can form any correct judgment of them is that they are never what they seem.