There are people whose society I find delicious; but when I sit alone and think of them I shudder.

Don't laugh at youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own.

How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?

All my life, as down an abyss without a bottom. I have been pouring van loads of information into that vacancy of oblivion I call my mind.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets.

People before the public live an imagined life in the thought of others, and flourish or feel faint as their self outside themselves grows bright or dwindles in that mirror.

The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection -even though nothing more than the pounding of an old piano -is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star.