When we say we are certain so-and-so can't possibly have done it, what we mean is that we think he very likely did.

A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent

One's own vanities and humiliations I find a delicious subject for conversation. Things said of me behind my back I don't enjoy, and don't listen to them.

To become young again would seem to me an appalling prospect. Youth is a kind of delirium, which can be cured, if it is ever cured at all, by years of painful treatment.

What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?

The truth is that the phenomena of artistic production are still so obscure, so baffling, we are still so far from an accurate scientific and psychological knowledge of their genesis or meaning, that we are forced to accept them as empirical facts; and empirical and non-explanatory names are the names that suit them best.

How it infuriates a bigot, when he is forced to drag out his dark convictions!