All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness.

Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment: only there does its satisfaction lie.

Sorrow is implicit in love as gravitation is implicit in mass.

These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.

She took kisses like so many coats of paint […] how long and how vainly I searched for excuses which might make her amorality if not palatable at lest understandable. I realize now the time I wasted in this way; instead of enjoying her and turning aside from these preoccupations with the thought, ‘She is untrustworthy as she is beautiful. She takes love as plants do water, lightly, thoughtlessly.

Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.

No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.