You, oh mature ones, keep company solely with other mature ones, and your maturity is so mature that it can only chum up with maturity!

To me, art almost always speaks more forcefully when it appears in an imperfect, accidental, and fragmentary way, somehow just signaling its presence, allowing one to feel it through the ineptitude of the interpretation. I prefer the Chopin that reaches me in the street from an open window to the Chopin served in great style from the concert stage.

I didn't go to the lectures. My valet, who was more distinguished than I, went instead.

Our element is unending immaturity.

I became bold because I had absolutely nothing to lose: neither honors, nor earnings, nor friends. I had to find myself anew and rely only on myself, because I could rely on no one else. My form is my solitude.

I am reading Sienkiewicz. What tormenting reading. What a powerful genius! And there never was such a first-rate writer of the second-rate class.

To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today.