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

It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.

And indeed, what is better than to sit by one's fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is buring?

Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.

Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.

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

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!