Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It's the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all.

I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing

The kiss itself is immortal. It travels from lip to lip, century to century, from age to age. Men and women garner these kisses, offer them to others and then die in turn.

It is better to be unhappy in love than unhappy in marriage, but some people manage to be both.

...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living.

Whether we are describing a king, an assassin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stallholder in a market, it is always ourselves that we are describing.