One road to happiness is to cultivate curiosity about everything. Not only about people but about subjects, not only about the arts but about history and foreign customs. Not only about countries and cities, but about plants and animals. Not only about lichened rocks and curious markings on the bark of trees, but about stars and atoms. Not only about your friends but about that strange labyrinth we inhabit which we call ourselves. Then, if we do that, we will never suffer a moment's boredom.

Everyone alters and is altered by everyone else. We are all the time taking in portions of one another or else reacting against them, and by these involuntary acquisitions and repulsions modifying our natures.

It is by sitting down to write every morning that he becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.

Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden death.

Poets and painters are outside the class system, or rather they constitute a special class of their own, like the circus people and the Gypsies.

Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself.

In a happy marriage it is the wife who provides the climate, the husband the landscape.