Only one hour in the normal day is more pleasurable than the hour spent in bed with a book before going to sleep, and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning.

It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.

Life, for all its agonies...is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing...and whatever is to come after it -- we shall not have this life again.

So they left the subject and played croquet, which is a very good game for people who are annoyed with one another, giving many opportunities for venting rancor.

At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.

Once you get to know your neighbors, you are no longer free, you are all tangled up, you have to stop and speak when you are out and you never feel safe when you are in.

The great and recurrent question about Abroad is, is it worth the trouble of getting there?

Human passions against eternal laws -- that is the everlasting conflict.

To lunch with the important ... that should be the daily goal of those for whom life is not a playground but a ladder.

The impulse to ask questions is among the more primitive human lusts.

As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals -- or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all.

Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.

You possess a divine strength to fulfill your dream.

At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.

Any technology is just a skillful means and it's how you use it.

The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world.

Homosexuals are brute beasts... part of a vile and satanic system that will be utterly annihilated, and there will be a celebration in heaven.

It's much tougher to be a restaurant critic now. You have to take a subway out to Brooklyn. I wouldn't want to do it.

When a person sets a thing in motion, there's a feeling of unease, almost regret, until you learn the truth.

I'm making the art for me first. I'm making it because these are the pictures I want to see. I'm making pictures that don't yet exist.

There's a great difference between being popular and being an artist.