Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.

Compromise yourself. Obscure your own trail.

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.

I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.

French people are Italian people in a bad mood.

Alas! I do not believe that inspiration falls from heaven. think it rather the result of a profound indolence.

I want the kind of readers who remain children at any cost. I can tell them at a glance: loyalty to that first enchantment guards better than any cosmetic; than any diet, against the insults of age. But alas for such readers, who would huddle safe and sound in the asylum of their credulous enchantment as if in the womb-our enervating century offends them by its chaos, its fidgets of light and space, the host of its excuses for dividing , for rending oneself from others and from oneself.