Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.

Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.

Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.

There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.

There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.

Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.