Not one of us can lie or pretend. We're all fixed in good faith in a certain concept of ourselves.

I am an "unrealized" character, dramatically speaking.

We all grasp on to a single idea of ourselves, the way aging people dye their hair. It’s no matter that this dye doesn’t fool you. My lady, you don’t dye your hair to decieve other people, or to fool yourself, but rather to cheat your image in your mirror a little.

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

Anyone can be heroic from time to time, but a gentleman is something you have to be all the time.

When a character is born, he acquires at once such an independence, even of his own author, that he can be imagined by everybody even in many other situations where the author never dreamed of placing him; and so he acquires for himself a meaning which the author never thought of giving him.

Each of us, face to face with other men, is clothed with some sort of dignity, but we know only too well all the unspeakable things that go on in the heart.