The glasses were half full, which meant that the guests were completely so

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

Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.

Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.

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

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.

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.