Anna Petrovna: Never talk to women about your own good qualities. Let them find out for themselves.

I have no will of my own. Never did. Limp and lily-livered, I always obey - is it possible that's attractive to women?

Anyone who says the artist's field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imageryYou are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author.

When men ask me how I know so much about men, they get a simple answer: everything I know about men, I learned from me.

It is as acceptable now to love the wives of others as it is to smoke their cigars and read their books.

Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or prison.

But if you had asked him what his work was, he would look candidly and openly at you with his large bright eyes through his gold pincenez, and would answer in a soft, velvety, lisping baritone: "My work is literature."