The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting.

There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.

The theme of the book is simple: a man is dying: you feel him sinking throughout the book; his thought and his memories pervade the whole with greater or lesser distinction (like the swell and...

Genius is an African who dreams up snow

The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions....

This irritated or puzzled such students of literature and their professors as were accustomed to ‘serious’ courses replete with ‘trends ’ and ‘schools ’ and ‘myths ’ and ‘symbols ’ and ‘social comment ’ and...

But soon the poltergeist ran out of ideas in connection with Aunt Maud and became, as it were, more eclectic. All the banal motions that objects are limited to in such cases, were gone through...

Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.

You have to be an artist and a madman…

The days of my youth, as I look back on them; seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a...

Let all of life be an unfettered howl.

At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells...

And yet I shall try again: “they are murdering me!”–all right, all together once more: “they are murdering me!” and again: “murdering”… I want to write this in such a way that you will cover...

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost...

There is only one school of literature — that of talent.