At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts.

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.

Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

Do you suppose that it is within your power to insult me? You evidently are not aware to whom you are speaking? Do you imagine that the envenomed spittle of five hundred little gentlemen of your type, heaped one upon another, would succeed in slobbering so much as the tips of my august toes?

One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.

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