The dead don't die. They look on and help.

You can have your cake and eat it. But my God, it will go rotten inside you.

I prefer unlucky things. Luck is vulgar. Who wants what luck would bring? I don't.

The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.

The search for happiness ... always ends in the ghastly sense of the bottomless nothingness into which you will inevitably fall if you strain any further.

Sex is the root of which intuition is the foliage and beauty is the flower.

I don't believe any more in democracy. But I can't believe in the old sort of aristocracy, either, nor can I wish it back, splendid as it was. What I believe in is the old Homeric aristocracy, when the grandeur was inside a man, and he lived in a simple wooden house.