Some of the poetic writers who insert passages of realism in their texts have no underlying philosophy to uphold them, and revert to realism.

I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

A lawyer I once knew told me of a strange case, a suffragette who had never married. After her death, he opened her trunk and discovered 50 wedding gowns.

Men like women who write, even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.

Someone said to me once that a cigarette at the right moment is better than all the ideals in the world.