Give me a bed and a book and I am happy.

We need new friends; some of us are cannibals who have eaten their old friends up; others must have ever-renewed audiences before whom to re-enact the ideal version of their lives.

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

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

Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.

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?

There is more felicity on the far side of baldness than young men can possibly imagine.