It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.

All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.

Promise is the capacity for letting people down.

A mutually fulfilled sexual union between two people is the rarest sensation which life can provide. But it is not quite real. It stops when the telephone rings. Such a passion can be kept at its early strength only by adding to it either more and more unhappiness (jealousy, separation, doubt, renunciation), or more and more artificiality (drink, technique, stage-illusions). Whoever has missed this has never lived, who lives for it alone is but partly alive.

The more I see of life the more I perceive that only through solitary communion with nature can one gain an idea of its richness and meaning.

The only happy talkers are dandies who extract pleasure from the very perishability of their material and who would not be able to tolerate the isolation of all other forms of composition; for most good talkers, when they have run down, are miserable; they know that they have betrayed themselves, that they have taken material which should have a life of its own, to dispense it in noises upon the air.

Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.