After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+ B, a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important part than people; love giving away to deductions and other forms of ideas, style, subject and interest. The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head, from the passion to the idea, from the drama to the denouement.

There are two infinities in this world: God up above, and down below, human baseness.

When incredulity becomes a faith, it is less rational than a religion.

Only a woman of the world is a woman; the rest are females.

Antiquity was perhaps created to provide professors with their bread and butter.

That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world, is a picture in a museum.

There are moments when, faced with our lack of success, I wonder whether we are failures, proud but impotent. One thing reassures me as to our value: the boredom that afflicts us. It is the hall-mark of quality in modern men.