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.

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.

Be orderly and disciplined in daily life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wild and violent in my art.

Read in order to live.

It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.

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

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