“Letters, I maintain, between the intervals of removing a half-chewed cigar from my pocket to my mouth, should always be egotistical.”

A playful defence of the personal and self-revealing nature of letter writing · Letter, collected correspondence

• Art
• Truth

“God is the country of the spirit, and each of us is given a little holding of ground in that country.”

Using the language of landscape to describe an intensely personal conception of the spiritual life · Letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson

• Faith
• Nature

“Seventeen whiskeys. A record, I think.”

Famous as his purported last recorded words, though the attribution is disputed by biographers · Popularly attributed remark, New York, 1953

• Death
• Mortality