When a woman isn't beautiful, people always say, 'You have lovely eyes, you have lovely hair.'

Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable.

Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.

I should like to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche somewhere in a train or a steamer, and to spend the whole night talking to him. I consider his philosophy won't last long, however. It's more showy than convincing.

We go to great pains to alter life for the happiness of our descendants and our descendants will say as usual: things used to be so much better, life today is worse than it used to be.

[Six principles that make for a good story:] 1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature; 2. total objectivity; 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects; 4. extreme brevity; 5. audacity and originality: flee the stereotype; 6. compassion.

He who desires nothing, hopes for nothing, and is afraid of nothing, cannot be an artist.