When a person doesn’t understand something, he feels internal discord: however he doesn’t search for that discord in himself, as he should, but searches outside of himself. Thence a war develops with that which he doesn’t understand.
I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.
Exquisite nature, daydreams, and music say one thing, real life another.
Thought and beauty, like a hurricane or waves, should not know conventional, delimited forms.
Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.
But if you had asked him what his work was, he would look candidly and openly at you with his large bright eyes through his gold pincenez, and would answer in a soft, velvety, lisping baritone: “My work is literature.”
Write only of what is important and eternal.
Dear sweet unforgettable childhood.
It always seems to the brothers and the father that their brother or son didn’t marry the right person.
The time has come for writers, especially those who are artists, to admit that in this world one cannot make anything out, just as Socrates once admitted it, just as Voltaire admitted it.
A tree is beautiful, but what’s more, it has a right to life; like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees.
I swear fearfully at the conventions of the stage.
I am now and have always been a stranger to the realm of practical matters.
Just as I shall lie alone in the grave, so, in essence, do I live alone.
To live simply to die is by no means amusing, but to live with the knowledge that you will die before your time, that’s really is idiotic.
A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.
There isn’t a Monday that would not cede its place to Tuesday.
I’m the seagull. No, that’s not it. I’m an actress. That’s it.
The critics suppose that it is easy to write a play. They aren’t aware that writing a good play is difficult and writing a bad one is twice as hard.
If you ever have need of my life, come and take it.