When a man and a woman love one another that is enough. That is marriage. A religious rite is superfluous. And if the man and woman live together without the love, no ceremony in the world can make it a marriage.

I am not good. I am not virtuous. I am not sympathetic. I am not generous. I am merely and above all a creature of intense passionate feeling. I feel—everything. It is my genius. It burns me like fire.

Well, if I am not vulgar, neither is my book. I wrote myself. Suggestiveness is always vulgar. But truth never. My book is not even remotely suggestive. I call things by their names. That is all.

I want to live quietly.

The art of Good Eating has two essential points: one must eat only when one is hungry, and one must take small bites.

I have never read a line of Walt Whitman.

Some day the Devil will come to me and say: 'Come with me.'And I will answer: 'Yes.