It takes a certain courage and a certain greatness even to be truly base.

It is restful, tragedy, because one knows that there is no more lousy hope left. You know you're caught, caught at last like a rat with all the world on its back. And the only thing left to do is shout - not moan, or complain, but yell out at the top of your voice whatever it was you had to say. What you've never said before. What perhaps you don't even know till now.

When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past... And when you are seventy, nearly all of you.

Obligations, hatreds, injuries; what did I expect my memories to be? I was forgetting remorse. Now I have a complete past.

Things are beautiful if you love them.

Have you noticed that life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?

Life is very nice, but it has no shape. The object of art is actually to give it some and to do it by every artifice possible-truer than the truth.