...the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

Perfume is that last and best reserve of the past, the one which when all out tears have run dry, can make us cry again!

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion

I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.

A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is.