A friend loves you for your intelligence, a mistress for your charm, but your family's love is unreasoning; you were born into it and are of its flesh and blood. Nevertheless it can irritate you more than any group of people in the world.

Experience is valuable only when it has brought suffering and when the suffering has left its mark upon both body and mind.

In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.

Everything that is in agreement with our personal desires seems true; everything that is not puts us in a rage.

The need to express one's self in writing springs from a maladjustment of life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action.

The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life.

You don't love a man for what he says, but love what he says because you love him.