It isn't common sense that is paramount in this world, it's wishful thinking.

The rich have a passion for bargains as lively as it is pointless.

My love of pleasure seems to be the only consistent side of my character. Is it because I have not read enough?

It is healthier to see the good points of others than to analyze our own bad ones.

He refused categorically all ideas of fidelity or serious commitments. He explained that they were arbitrary and sterile. From anyone else such views would have shocked me, but I knew that in his case they did not exclude tenderness and devotion - feelings which came all the more easily to him since he was determined that they should be transient.

Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.

I had a strong desire to write and some free time.