The first war had ruined him. He had volunteered, though he was over military age and was fighting a country he loved; his health was broken, and he came back to a new literary world which had carefully eliminated him. For some of his later work he could not even find a publisher in England. No wonder he preferred to live abroad - in Provence or New York. But I don't suppose failure disturbed him much: he had never really believed in human happiness, his middle life had been made miserable by passion, and he had come through - with his humour intact, his stock of unreliable anecdotes, the kind of enemies a man ought to have, and a half-belief in a posterity which would care for good writing.

Yes, society must go on; it must breed, like rabbits. That is what we are here for. But then, I don't like society - much. I am that absurd figure, an American…

Mind, I am not preaching anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not advocating free love in this or any other case. Society must go on, I suppose, and so…

She asked him perpetually what he wanted. What did he want? What did he want? And all he ever answered was: 'I have told you'. He meant that he wanted the girl…

At present, I am a poet trying to be a soldier. To tell the truth, I am not interested in writing nowadays, except in so far as writing is the expression of so…

It is possible that the malice of writers has been overrated (by myself among others). Reading their ruminations on their craft, one sees why this writer could…

Such bickerings to recount, met often in these our writers, what more worth is it than to chronicle the wars of kites or crows flocking and fighting in the air?