Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose. - Cyril Connolly

Both my happiness and unhappiness I owe to the love of pleasure; of sex, travel, reading, conversation (hearing oneself talk), food, drink, cigars and lying in warm water.

If our elaborate and dominating bodies are given to us to be denied at every turn, if our nature is always wrong and wicked, how ineffectual we are — like fishes not meant to swim.

...art is made by the alone for the alone… The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication...