A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well.

What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.

As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning, . . . [then] they fall down the curtains.

Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!

There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.

You walk on corpses, beauty, undismayed.

What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.