Perhaps the greatest consolation of the oppressed is to consider themselves superior to their tyrants.

The man I am will always raise a protest against the man I wanted to be and the two will live together to the end, but the man I wanted to be will be the one on whom judgement will be passed.

Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them.

A scrupulous man will never produce a great novel.

Perhaps the greatest consolation of the oppressed is to consider themselves superior to their tyrants.

If people only knew what lies at the heart of my novels! What a tumult of desires these carefully written pages conceal! I sometimes have a loathing for the furious cravings that give me no peace except when I am working.

Yesterday, happiness came in suddenly, as it used to, and remained for a moment in the great, dark, silent drawing room.