Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.
Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.
Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.
Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.
No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.
No decent career was ever founded on a public.
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.