It is not the prisoners who need reformation, it is the prisons.

Every woman becomes their mother. That's their tragedy. And no man becomes his. That's his tragedy.

I didn't have a life until I went up onstage.

A glass of absinthe is as poetical as anything in the world. What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset?

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

Sometime you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such thing as romantic experience; there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance- that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long someday to feel