“God is only a great imaginative experience.”
“Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.”
“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.”
“We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free from their authority.”
“My God, these folks don't know how to love -- that's why they love so easily.”
“I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.”
“Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”
“I shall always be a priest of love.”
“Never trust the teller, trust the tale.”
“Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.”
“Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.”
“How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.”
“Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.”
“I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.”
“The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.”
“The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.”
“Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.”
“The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.”
“Tragedy is like strong acid -- it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.”
“If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of a harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.”
“The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.”
“I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.”
“We need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with.”
“The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action, in man.”
“The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.”
“There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.”
“One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.”
“Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art -- or almost the only stuff.”
“The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent.”
“The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up.”