When you work to please others you can't succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone's interest.

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

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

This dim coolness of my room was to the broad daylight of the street what the shadow is to the sunbeam, that is to say equally luminous, and presented to my imagination the entire panorama of summer, which my senses, if I had been out walking, could have tasted and enjoyed only piecemeal; and so it was quite in harmony with my state of repose which (thanks to the enlivening adventures related in my books) sustained, like a hand reposing motionless in a stream of running water, the shock and animation of a torrent of activity.

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.

Lies are essential to humanity.

It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.