Caitlin Thomas Quotes

When the desire is on for one particular person, nobody else will do ...

But the true evil of drink lies in the disillusion: that the initial pleasure very soon evaporates, leaving a demoralizing craving for more, which is not even temporarily pleasurable. Which then leads to deterioration of the faculties of both body and mind; plus a bewildering lack of co-operation between the two.

Anybody who thinks there is any vague chance of adult exchange with a child is up the spout; and would be much less disappointed if they recognized the chasm unbridgeably dividing them.

There is, happily, no limit to the faith of human nature in believing what it wants to believe.

[On journalists:] They are as disruptive a menace to the public body: as grating turds in the intestines are to the private body.

Between threading a needle and raving insanity is the smallest eye in creation.

Sex divorced from love is the thief of personal dignity.

There is a great gulf between the really creative person and normal people. The totally creative person does not have the rest of his life in proper proportion.

Jealousy is the lifelong noose hanging about the neck of love.

There is no gaiety as gay as the gaiety of grief.

Anybody who drinks seriously is poor: so poor, poor, extra poor, me.

Anyone who has attempted to create knows the hellishness of it, which consists in the final inescapability from it. Knows that anything, however deadly humdrum to drug the senses, is preferable to it. Knows the gigantic effort to get started on the boundless, unwieldy, shapeless material; the forest of hesitations; of what to keep and what to throw out; the running-out terror and reluctance in one of finishing.

England, where nobody ever says what they mean: and by denying feeling, kill it off stone-cold at the roots ...

Love can bear anything better than ridicule.

Money ... is only important when you have none; and though it may not be everything, it goes a very long way towards blocking up the winter draft of age.

[On journalists:] They are the scavengers of society who, possessing no guts of their own, tear out the guts of celebrities. They have the sycophantic, false enthusing gush of maiden aunts: who are accustomed to being trampled on doormats.

There is nothing harder for an Artist than to retain his Artistic integrity in the tomb of success. A tomb, nevertheless, which nearly every Artist: whether he admits it or not; naturally wants to get into.

In America they make too much fuss of poets; in London they make too little.

Resignation, perhaps the most stifling word in the language.

There is a brotherliness about a drinking person, which is coldly lacking in the straight and narrow enemies of drink; the difference between the two is more marked than nationality or belief: it is an opposite species altogether. It is against the unwritten laws of congeniality for them to mix. For me, a man who does not drink is distinctly indecent ...

There is this malign curse laid on dipsomaniacs. That they must absolutely have a drink: in order to feel strong enough to stop drinking.

I don't trust sentimentality in men; it goes with tyranny; you can't have one without the other.

A lot of warm vulgarity is incomparably preferable to a little bit of pinched niceness