The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.
Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
There are no second acts in American lives.
Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.
Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.
It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.
It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.
There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.
I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
