Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad; hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us.

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.

The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.

"I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish."

Those running tights the young women wear now, so they look like spacewomen, raspberry red and electric green so tight they show every muscle right into the crack between the buttocks, what is the point of them? Display. Young animals need to display.

So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.

All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.

Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.