One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.
Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.
I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.