The only certainty is death.

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

War! When I but think of this word, I feel bewildered, as though they were speaking to me of sorcery, of the Inquisition, of a distant, finished, abominable, monstrous, unnatural thing. When they speak to us of cannibals, we smile proudly, as we proclaim our superiority to these savages. Who are the real savages? Those who struggle in order to eat those whom they vanquish, or those who struggle merely to kill?

To contest an author's right to create a poetic or realistic work is to want to force him to change his temperament, challenge his originality, refuse to allow him to use the eye and the intelligence nature has given him.

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

There is only one good thing in life, and that is love. And how you misunderstand it! how you spoil it! You treat it as something solemn like a sacrament, or something to be bought, like a dress.

The only certainty is death.