One keeps forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave.
There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.
A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts.
If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without truffles.
January, month of empty pockets! let us endure this evil month, anxious as a theatrical producer's forehead.
Never touch a butterfly's wing with your finger.
You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.
In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge.
I am going away with him to an unknown country where I shall have no past and no name, and where I shall be born again with a new face and an untried heart.
My true friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I loved.
You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.
To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.
Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.
Sincerity is not a spontaneous flower nor is modesty either.
The faults of husbands are often caused by the excess virtues of their wives.
Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
There is no need to waste pity on young girls who are having their moments of disillusionment, for in another moment they will recover their illusion.
As for an authentic villain, the real thing, the absolute, the artist, one rarely meets him even once in a lifetime. The ordinary bad hat is always in part a decent fellow.
No temptation can ever be measured by the value of its object.
It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.
