Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.

She is unable to dream, think or love. In a woman, poetry never comes naturally, but always as the result of education. Only the woman of the world is a woman; the rest are simply females.

One of the proud joys of the man of letters - if that man of letters is an artist - is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world's memory.

I have always derived indescribable pleasure from leading a decent woman to the edge of sin and leaving her there to live between the temptation and the fear of that sin.

There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.

Sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate.