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

People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.

A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.

I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.

Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.

…I once found a list of diseases as yet unclassified by medical science, and among these there occurred the word Islomania, which was described as a rare but by no means unknown affliction of spirit. There are people…who find islands somehow irresistible. The mere knowledge that they are on an island, a little world surrounded by the sea, fills them with an indescribable intoxication. These born “islomanes”…are direct descendents of the Atlanteans

It’s only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.