People should be interested in books, not their authors.

I believe, Messieurs, in loyalty---to one's friends and one's family and one's caste.

I can think of nothing more soul destroying in life than to persist in trying to do a thing you want desperately to do well, and to know that you are at the best second rate.

Youth is a failing only too easily outgrown.

Everyone likes talking about himself. - Hercule Poirot

We owe most of our great inventions and most of the achievements of genius to idleness either enforced or voluntary.

If we seek to keep the past alive, we end, I think, by distorting it.