A woman will always sacrifice herself if you give her the opportunity. It is her favourite form of self indulgence.

Her tears were partly tears of happiness, for she felt that the strangeness between them was gone. She loved him now with a new love because he had made her suffer.

Music-hall songs provide the dull with wit, just as proverbs provide them with wisdom.

But the only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you; it may have other and much more profound meanings for the critic, but at second-hand they can be of small service to you.

Life wouldn’t be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.

Perhaps it would have been possible to see in him a new Prometheus...the hero who for the good of mankind exposes himself to the agonies of the damned...undaunted by failure, by an unceasing effort of courage holding despair at bay, doggedly persistent in the face of self-doubt, which is the artist's bitterest enemy.