The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.

What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!

One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented when they got tired of all the others.

Books aren't made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids. There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it's back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands there in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

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.