There was nothing abnormal about it when homosexuality was the norm.

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.

If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.

There is no doubt that a person's charms are less frequently a cause of love than a remark such as: 'No, this evening I shan't be free'.

Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.

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

Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.