conversation is like a dear little baby that is brought in to be handed round. You must rock it, nurse it, keep it on the move if you want it to keep smiling.

Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order.

But the more poetry one reads the more one longs to read!

What is it with me? Am I absolutely nobody, but merely inordinately vain? I do not know…. But I am most fearfully unhappy. That is all. I am so unhappy that I wish I was dead—yet I should be mad to die when I have not yet lived at all.

The ostrich burying its head in the sand does at any rate wish to convey the impression that its head is the most important part of it.

To be alive and to be a ‘writer’ is enough.

roses are the only flowers at garden-parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing.