You don't want to love - your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren't positive, you're negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you've got a shortage somewhere.

A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.

It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.

They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.

Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.

Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff.

All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.