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

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

The style, which is something I take to heart, is getting on my nerves horribly. It frustrates and torments me. I have days when Iam sick about it and nights when it gives me a fever. The more I go at it the more I find myself incapable of conveying the Idea.

There are three thing in the world I love most: the sea, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni.

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.

The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.

Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments.