Success as I see it is a result, not a goal.
For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act.
On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act.
The hearts of women are like those little pieces of furniture with secret hiding – places, full of drawers fitted into each other; you go a lot of trouble, break your nails, and in the bottom find some withered flower, a few grains of dust – or emptiness!
You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.
I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world.
Casting aspersions on those we love always does something to loosen our ties. We shouldn’t maltreat our idols: the gilt comes off on our hands.
She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.
Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.
I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.
Prose is like hair; it shines with combing.
The public wants work which flatters its illusions.
Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that’s the one they invented when they got tired of all the others.
The principal thing in this world is to keep one’s soul aloft.
One mustn’t always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.
And he beholds the moon; like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.
The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.
You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.