What you really are is a Bunburyist. I was quite right in saying you were a Bunburyist. You are one of the most advanced Bunburyists I know.

The weather is entrancing, but in my heart there is no sun.

Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance.

In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.... The Japanese people are ... simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.

To be popular I must be mediocre.

Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishment on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realize what it has done. When the man's punishment is over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins.