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.

If you are losing your leisure, look out! You are losing your soul.

This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication.

Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

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.

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

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?