She was a sweet girl but not really pretty, a rough sketch of a woman with a little of everything in her, one of those silhouettes which artists draw in three strokes on the tablecloth in a café after dinner, between a glass of brandy and a cigarette. Nature sometimes turns out creatures like that.

Great minds that are healthy are never considered geniuses, while this sublime qualification is lavished on brains that are often inferior but are slightly touched by madness.

You must render: never report.

Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.

Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governments.

Broad daylight does not encourage the apprehension of horror.

Were a man to spend only one day in Sicily and ask, "What must one see?" I would answer him without hesitation, "Taormina." It is only a landscape, but a landscape where you find everything on earth that seems made to seduce the eyes, the mind and the imagination.