Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.

Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. ... For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.

God knows; I won't be an Oxford don anyhow. I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious. Or perhaps I'll lead the life of pleasure for a time and then—who knows?—rest and do nothing. What does Plato say is the highest end that man can attain here below? To sit down and contemplate the good. Perhaps that will be the end of me too.

[on his deathbed in a Paris hotel room] Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.

I like talking to a brick wall- it's the only thing in the world that never contradicts me!

Art, like Nature, has her monsters

A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public to him are non-existent.