“I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Readers, are an afterthought.”

“I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that it is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence, which is really when one first begins writing one feels that one would not have been one emerging from adolescence if there had not been a beginning and a middle and an ending to anything.”

“I love my love with a b because she is peculiar.”

“It is the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning as they did before,”

“It is very easy to love alone.”

“I had often said that I would write, the wives of geniuses I have sat with. I have sat with so many. I have sat with wives who were not wives, of geniuses who were real geniuses. I have sat with real wives of geniuses who were not real geniuses. In short, I have sat very often and very long with many wives and wives of many geniuses.' Gertrude Stein wrote this in the voice of her partner, Alice B. Toklas, Stein being apparently the genius, Alice apparently the wife. 'I am nothing,' Alice said after Gertrude dies, 'but a memory of her.'...the flashing blues and red made him look ill, then well, then ill again...”

“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story.”

“There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing.”

“When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that.”

“Men and girls, men and girls: Artificial swine and pearls.”

“Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.”