Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.

Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.

One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to every page.

If every museum in the New World were emptied, if every famous building in the Old World were destroyed and only Venice saved, there would be enough there to fill a full lifetime with delight. Venice, with all its complexity and variety, is in itself the greatest surviving work of art in the world.

You don't remove the evil in a person by killing the person.

Now we shall both be alone, and I shall have no way of making you understand.' 'I don't want to make it easier for you,' I said; 'I hope your heart may break; but I do understand.

It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one's stature on the edge of the door.