“Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain — the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed — then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.”

“I cannot help feeling there is something essentially wrong about love. Friends may quarrel or drift apart, close relations too, but there is not this pang, this pathos, this fatality which clings to love. Friendship never has that doomed look. Why, what is the matter? I have not stopped loving you, but because I cannot go on kissing your dim dear face, we must part, we must part.”

“If onlyit were possible to juicily belch up the lifeone's lived, chew it anew and gulp it down,and then once more to roll it with a fat,ox-like tongue, to squeeze from its eternaldregs the former sweetness of crisp grass,drunk with the morning dew and the bitternessof lilac leaves!”

“Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both truth and art.”

“Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudo-literature—these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know.”

“To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue.”

“Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.”