If I could, I would stop the passage of time. But hour follows on hour, minute on minute, each second robbing me of a morsel of myself for the nothing of tomorrow. I shall never experience this moment again.

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.

You must render: never report.

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

I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt.

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.

One sometimes weeps over one's illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.