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

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

My dear Algy, you talk exactly as if you were a dentist. It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn't a dentist. It produces false impression

What a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us.

The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigraph on his tombstone.