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?

We are accustomed to use our eyes only with the memory of what other people before us have thought about the object we are looking at.

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

The secret is not to betray your ignorance. Just maneuver, avoid the quicksands and obstacles, and the rest can be found in a dictionary.

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

Ale, not beer, in a pewter mug was comme il faut, the only thing for a gentleman of letters, worthy of the name, to drink.

breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is dying. to live, in fact, is to die.