The old know what they want; the young are sad and bewildered.

Thank heavens, the sun has gone in and I don’t have to go out and enjoy it.

What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of gleaming thought; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. But always the rarest, those streaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach.

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.

The test of enjoyment is the remembrance which it leaves behind.

I might give my life for my friend, but he had better not ask me to do up a parcel.

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