“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.”

“It is significant comment on the victory of science over magic that were someone to say if I put this pill in your beer it will explode, we might believe them; but were they to cry if I pronounce t...”

“Two fears alternate in marriage, of loneliness and of bondage. The dread of loneliness being keener than the fear of bondage, we get married. For one person who fears being thus tied there are four...”

“Youth is a period of missed opportunities.”

“What worked yesterday doesn't always work today.”

“The vision of your tomorrow that you have today strengthens you for the morrow”

“Let us not be deceived we are today in the midst of a cold war.”

“I cannot express how lordly and transfigured I felt at that moment. I was a prince of that harbor, a porpoise king - slim among the buoys and the water traffic.”

“This [sand-dollar hunting] had become one of our rituals together, and though she would search for other varieties of shells when I was out of town or unable to see her, she would wait until I appe...”

“Over the drop, a luminous pond lay below them like a pale magic lantern. It was as if the moon had plummeted into the water and smashed open. Engulfed in darkness, with only a scatter of stars abov...”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”