The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.

Convalescence

"Healing," Papa would tell me, "is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature."

Death and Dying

The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.

Evil

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.

Faces

My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.

Humor

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.

Literature

If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.

Marriage

Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.

Mind

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.

Names

Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.

Patience

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.

Poetry and Poets

Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.

Secrets

You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.

Sin

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.

Talent

It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one's nose, a good deal of it to know in which direction to point that organ.

Writers and Writing

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.