"California is a queer place in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort."

"The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute."

"One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them."

"The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters - not to talk in armies and nations and numbers - but to track it home."

"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."

"There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master."

"Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad."

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

"If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule."

"This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten."

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

"Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken."

"I shall always be a priest of love."

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically."

"Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!"

"Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer."

"Only in a novel are all things given full play."

"I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment."

"The American grips himself, at the very sources of his consciousness, in a grip of care: and then, to so much of the rest of life, is indifferent. Whereas, the European hasn't got so much care in him, so he cares much more for life and living."

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

"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."

"Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved."

"Men and women should stay apart, till their hearts grow gentle towards one another again."

"Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep."

"The proper study of mankind is man in his relation to his deity."

"The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death."

"For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive."

"The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do."

"God doesn't know things. He is things."

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

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

"There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street."

"Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got."

"Men! The only animal in the world to fear."

"I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd."

"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."

"The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?"

"It is so much more difficult to live with one's body than with one's soul. One's body is so much more exacting: what it won't have it won't have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet."

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

"Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them."

"The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure."

"All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing."

"When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere."

"Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was."

"Europe's the mayonnaise, but America supplies the good old lobster."

"Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description."

"I am in love - and, my God, it is the greatest thing that can happen to a man. I tell you, find a woman you can fall in love with. Do it. Let yourself fall in love. If you have not done so already, you are wasting your life."

"Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent."

"The soul is a very perfect judge of her own motions, if your mind doesn't dictate to her."

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