“the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirror on every page”

“One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.”

“Some drink to forget, I drink to remember. I drink in order to understand what I mean and to discover what I know. Under its benign influence all the stories and dramas which properly belong to the...”

“absinthe removes the bitter taste of failure and grants me strange visions which are charming principally because they cannot be written down. Only in absinthe do I become entirely free and, when I...”

“But just as my philosophy had ceased to interest me as soon as it was formulated into a set of principles so, when I saw myself being imitated, I realised at once what an incubus my aesthetic perso...”

“Women, of their nature, crave for liberty; they will not be ordered around like servants.”

“They had engaged in what could not be called treatment or even discussion, but open combat, the two of them a microcosm of the great war raging in the far distance: one side that desired autonomy, ...”

“Don't let the rain drive you to the wrong shelter; the shade can turn out to be your protector and also your destroyer, and sometimes the rain is the perfect protector from the rain.”

“The child psychologist's clinic: where imaginary friends go to die, where dreams go to burn, where creativity goes to drown.”

“Bedlam: an institution with a history so fearsome it gave its name to a synonym for chaos and pandemonium.”

“Let me feel how thy pulses beat.”

“Jesus Christ! A man could only take so much. She yelped as he snatched her up around the waist and sat her on the counter. Sit there and dont move. Dont bat your eyes. Dont lick your lips. Dont get...”

“It was a superstition among them that a lover who smoked would always return, even from France. A man's sexual capacity might be injured by smoking, but they would always prefer a faithful to a pot...”