Thomas Wolfe

"In Sleep we lie all naked and alone, in Sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, and we are strange and beautiful asleep; for we are dying the darkness and we know no death."

"If a man has talent and can't use it, he's failed. If he uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he uses the whole of it, he has succeeded, and won a satisfaction and triumph few men ever know."

"Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you."

"You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity."

"Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs."

"America - it is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the only place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time."

"All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken."

"Publishing is a very mysterious business. It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good."

"You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money compliments or publicity."

"Most of the time we think we're sick it's all in the mind."

"Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man."

"Is not this the true romantic feeling - not to desire to escape life but to prevent life from escaping you."

"If a man has a talent and cannot use it he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it he has partly failed. If he has a talent and learns somehow to use the whole of it he has gloriously succeeded and won a satisfaction and a triumph few men ever know."

"Death - the last voyage the longest the best."

"That enfabled rock that ship of life that swarming million-footed tower-masted sky-soaring citadel that bears the magic name of the Island of Manhattan."

"There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves."

"Lost. He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know any one, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never."

"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."

"The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it."

"What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish."