Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”, February 25, 1933]
When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.
As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers, so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.” – “Meglio scrivere per se stessi e non avere un pubblico piuttosto che scrivere per gli altri e non essere se stessi”.
A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no
The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence to be always calm … to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.
A ceremony of self-wastage – good talkers are miserable they know that they have betrayed themselves that they have taken material which should have a life of its own to disperse it in noises upon the air.
Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of modern cowardice.
All charming people have something to conceal usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.
The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other’s dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.
Greed like the love of comfort is a kind of fear.
Happiness lies in the fulfillment of the spirit through the body.
Hate is the consequence of fear we fear something before we hate it a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.
We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion if we want to be happy.
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be grasped at once.
Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we learn to walk.
Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those that do.
Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
A life based on reason will always require to be balanced by an occasional bout of violent and irrational emotion for the instinctual tribes must be satisfied.
The man who is master of his passions is Reason’s slave.
We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of self.
Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of modern cowardice.
Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self.
In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.
We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.
Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.
The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
Hate is the consequence of fear we fear something before we hate it a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.
There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
The true index of a man’s character is the health of his wife.
Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.
Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be grasped at once.
The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.
Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.
The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.
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.