Talent is nothing but long patience.

A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.

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

You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.

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.

One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.

For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.