To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.
Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.
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.
Forgotten is forgiven.
It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.
Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.
I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.
His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.
In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.
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.
A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.
After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.
Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.