If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.

Night had come—night that she loved of all times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine more clearly than by day.

In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality.

... the transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy, and upon a nice arrangement between the two the whole fortune of his works depend.

But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.