Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.

I felt that Paris was illuminated by a splendor possessed by no other places.

I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.

Truth is for tailors and shoemakers. I, on the contrary, have always held that the Lord has a penchant for masquerades.

When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find out that it is the same in all her music.

I was young, and by instinct of self-preservation I had to collect my energy on something, if I were not to be whirled away with the dusk on the farm-roads, or the smoke on the plain. I begun in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales, and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times.

People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue.