“I cannot express the uneasiness caused in me by this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room I had at last filled with myself to the point of paying no more attention to the room than to that self. The anesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things.”

“I would have thought you’d pay more attention to your closest competition.”“I would—if you were competition worth paying attention to.”

“Far better it is for you to say: "I am a sinner," than to say: "I have no need of religion." The empty can be filled, but the self-intoxicated have no room for God.”

“I know that, like many other writers, I have many faults, for I am the first to be dissatisfied with myself . . . At the moment when I am trying to review my life's work, I often realize with pain that I have literally failed to express one-twentieth part of what I had wanted to, and perhaps could have expressed. The thing that comforts me is the constant hope that one day God will grant me so much inspiration . . . that I shall be able to express myself more fully, that, in short, I shall express all that is locked in my heart and in my imagination . . . I cannot help feeling that there is much more hidden in me than I have hitherto been able to express as a writer. And yet, speaking without false modesty, there is a great deal that is true and that came from my heart in what I have expressed already.”

“I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.”

“So there were people who got up at noon, pared their toenails, and sat naked in hotel rooms without regarding each day as an apocalypse. Amazing! If someone had burst into my room and found me naked and paring my nails, I would have died of shock. Or would I? Maybe I was stronger than I thought.”