Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.

For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?

Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.

Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signaling to be let out.

Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.

No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind.

Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

The dread of lonliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.

The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.

There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life.

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.