When all is said and done, no literature can outdo the cynicism of real life; you won’t intoxicate with one glass someone who has already drunk up a whole barrel.
People’s destinies are so different. Some people drag along, unnoticed and boring – they’re all alike, and they’re all unhappy. Then there are others, like for instance you – you’re one in a million. You’re happy –.
People should be beautiful in every way – in their faces, in the way they dress, in their thoughts, and in their innermost selves.
My love is like a stone tied round my neck; it’s dragging me down to the bottom; but I love my stone. I can’t live without it.
When a woman isn’t beautiful, people always say, ‘You have lovely eyes, you have lovely hair.’
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.
In all the universe nothing remains permanent and unchanged but the spirit.
A man and a woman marry because both of them do not know what to do with themselves.
In countries where there is a mild climate, less effort is expended on the struggle with nature and man is kinder and more gentle.
Faith is an aptitude of the spirit. It is, in fact, a talent: you must be born with it.
An expansive life, one not constrained by four walls, requires as well an expansive pocket.
The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.
I divide all literary works into two categories: Those I like and those I don’t like. No other criterion exists for me.
I expect I shall be a student to the end of my days.
The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.
I would love to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche on a train or boat and to talk with him all night. Incidentally, I don’t consider his philosophy long-lived. It is not so much persuasive as full of bravura.
If you look at anything long enough, say just that wall in front of you – it will come out of that wall.
And only now, when he was gray-haired, had he fallen in love properly, thoroughly, for the first time in his life.
An actress without talent, forty years old, ate a partridge for dinner, and I felt sorry for the partridge, for it occurred to me that in its life it had been more talented, more sensible, and more honest than the actress.
You only have to start a job of work to realize how few decent, honest folk there are about.