I believe that friendship, like love, of which it is a particular kind, requires nearly as much art as a successful choreography.

I could say that all my books were conceived by the time I was twenty, although they were not to be written for another thirty or forty years. But perhaps this is true of most writers—the emotional storage is done very early on.

Laws change more slowly than custom, and though dangerous when they fall behind the times are more dangerous still when they presume to anticipate custom.

The landscape of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pell-mell. There I see my nature, itself composite, made up of equal parts of instinct and training. Here and there protrude the granite peaks of the inevitable, but all about is rubble from the landslips of chance.

But happiness is brittle, and if men and circumstances don't destroy it, it is threatened by ghosts.

In the evenings the art of building gave way to that of music, which is architecture, too, though invisible.

I think still that someone wiser than I might well have remained happy till his death.