What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.

In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.

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.

And he beholds the moon; like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.

One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.

The citadel of Machaerus rose east of the Dead Sea on a basalt Peak shaped like a cone, girdled by four deep valleys; two about its sides, one in front, and the fourth behind.

I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker's head if they're not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it's bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God's face when it's bitter