What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.

As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

Success as I see it is a result, not a goal.

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.

And indeed, what is better than to sit by one's fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is buring?

I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.