Had it not been for you, I should have remained what I was when we first met, a prejudiced, narrow-minded being, with contracted sympathies and false knowledge, wasting my life on obsolete trifles, and utterly insensible to the privilege of living in this wondrous age of change and progress.

I think that an author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Those authors who appear sometimes to forget they are writers, and remember they are men, will be our favorites.

Extreme views are never just; something always turns up which disturbs the calculations formed upon their data.

All Paradise opens! Let me die eating ortolans to the sound of soft music!

A precedent embalms a principle.

We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end.