It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.

Exuberance is better than taste.

But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt comes off in our hands.

She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among ruins. She had to extract a kind of personal advantage from things and she rejected as useless everything that promised no immediate gratification — for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery.

How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act.

It's a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.

I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.