The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships. The novel can help us to live,as nothing else can: no didactic Scripture, anyhow. If the novelist keeps his thumb out of the pan.
But he could not taste, he could not feel. In the teashop among the tables and the chattering waiters the appalling fear came over him- he could not feel. He could reason; he could read, Dante for example, quite easily…he could add up his bill; his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then- that he could not feel.
Even under the most perfect Social Democracy we should, without Communism, still be living like hogs, except that each hog would get his fair share of grub.... Whilst we are hogs, let us at least be well-fed, healthy, reciprocally useful hogs, instead of--well, instead of the sort we are at present.
Keep writing. Try to do a little bit every day, even if the result looks like crap. Getting from page four to page five is more important than spending three weeks getting page four perfect.
You must have a cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?
When you look back on your life, it looks as though it were a plot, but when you are into it, it's a mess: just one surprise after another. Then, later, you see it was perfect.
The diversity in the human family should be the cause of love and harmony, as it is in music where many different notes blend together in the making of a perfect chord.
I don't know how to talk. Oh! talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact.
The ultimate design of the Mysteries ... was to lead us back to the principles from which we descended, ... a perfect enjoyment of intellectual [spiritual] good.
I don't know that I could draw one that's perfect. But I'd rather by approximately right than precisely wrong, and it would be precisely wrong to turn it down.
The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that is seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilized cynic to do other than to worship it.