If you don't make mistakes, you don't make anything .

What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history.

History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.

I can't imagine a human being so hard up for something to do as to quarrel with me.

Sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self-control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I daren't.

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

Your strength is just an accident owed to the weakness of others.