What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.

People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the common bacillus.

Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.

Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey.

And indeed when we are no longer in love with women whom we meet after many years, is there not the abyss of death between them and ourselves, just as much as if they were no longer of this world, since the fact that we are no longer in love makes the people that they were or the person that we were then as good as dead?

The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.