I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had.
The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.
No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.
In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg.Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?
They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.
It is suicide to be abroad. But what it is to be at home, … what it is to be at home? A lingering dissolution.