What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner.

beautiful December grapes, blue as plums, every grape a little skinful of sweet, tasteless water

When she raises her eyelids it's as if she were taking off all her clothes.

As for an authentic villain, the real thing, the absolute, the artist, one rarely meets him even once in a lifetime. The ordinary bad hat is always in part a decent fellow.

I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering.

There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.

One keeps forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave.