The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.

There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtures are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.

Travel ennobles the spirit and does away with our prejudices.

Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

The only way to atone for being occasionally overdressed is to be massively overeducated.