The French are a tremendously verbal race: they kill you with their assurances, their repetitions, their reasons, their platitudes, their formulae, their propositions, their solutions.

Humorists are always pessimists. They're reactionaries: because they see that every golden cloud has a black lining.

Strange is the influence of Marx on character.

She was able to feel active creation going on around her in the rocks and hills, where the mystery of lust took place; and in herself, where all was yet only the night of senses and wild dreams, the work of passion going on.

All middle-class novels are about the trials of three, all upper-class novels about mass fornication, all revolutionary novels about a bad man turned good by a tractor.

I know your breed; all your fine officials debauch the younger girls who are afraid to lose their jobs: that's as old as Washington.

Socialist writers are made of sterner stuff than those who only let their characters steeplechase through trouble in order to comeout first in the happy ending of moral uplift.