Only by avoiding the beginning of things can we escape their end.

Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.

Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph-green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.

There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.

We may assume that we keep people waiting symbolically because we do not wish to see them and that our anxiety is due not to being late, but to having to see them at all.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.

The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.

There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.

While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.

All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.

Nature alone can lead to the understanding of art, just as art brings us back to nature with greater awarness. It is the source of all beauty, since it is the source of all life.

The only certainty is death.

The meaning of life is not celebrating your birth, it is celebrating your work.

…they speak great swelling words of emptiness…

Maybe you have been looking for peace for no one but yourself.

I wasn't young, I wasn't pretty, it was necessary to find other weapons.

I just think that humans were created to look upward

Your troubles will always bve my troubles,so long as were married.

The transaction between writer and reader is human civilization's most dazzling feat, yet it's such a part of our lives that it's, well, prosaic.