It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.

The important thing is being capable of emotions, but to experience only one's own would be a sorry limitation.

But can one still make resolutions when one is over forty? I live according to twenty-year-old habits.

Not everyone can be an orphan.

It is not becoming to lay to virtue the weariness of old age.

Each thought becomes an anxiety in my brain. I am becoming the ugliest of all things: a busy man.

Society knows perfectly well how to kill a man and has methods more subtle than death