Only in a novel are all things given full play.

Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art – or almost the only stuff.

All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.

A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one’s religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.

How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.

I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth’s follies – thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.

I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.

You don’t want to love – your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren’t positive, you’re negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you’ve got a shortage somewhere.

The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.

God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.

I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.

One sheds one’s sicknesses in books – repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be master of them.

There is only one thing that a man really wants to do, all his life; and that is, to find his way to his God, his Morning Star, salute his fellow man, and enjoy the woman who has come the long way with him.

Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.

My whole working philosophy is that the only stable happiness for mankind is that it shall live married in blessed union to woman-kind – intimacy, physical and psychical between a man and his wife. I wish to add that my state of bliss is by no means perfect.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

The true artist doesn’t substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser one.

I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.