And I have the sunset, and the Tuscan wine, and the white teeth of the women in Rome. I am a traveler in Romance.

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

I don't understand anything. Life is so strange. I feel like some one who's lived all his life by a duck-pond and suddenly is shown the sea. It makes me a little breathless, and yet it fills me with elation. I don't want to die, I want to live. I'm beginning to feel a new courage. I feel like one of those old sailors who set sail for undiscovered seas and I think my soul hankers for the unknown.

For the complete life, the perfect pattern includes old age as well as youth and maturity.

The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so.

Sentimentality is the only sentiment that rubs you the wrong way.

There's no one as transparent as the person who thinks he's devilish deep.