Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.

The English are crooked as a nation and honest as individuals. The contrary is true of the French, who are honest as a nation and crooked as individuals.

Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.

Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.