I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.
I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn't pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think and novelists to see what I could get away with. And, in the end, I distilled everything down to one wonderfully simple principle: win or die.
I think there's something degrading about having a husband for a rival. It's humiliating if you fail and commonplace if you succeed.
A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate
To seduce a woman famous for strict morals, religious fervor and the happiness of her marriage: what could possibly be more prestigious?
I have always thought of sophistication as rather a feeble substitute for decadence.