“I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt.”

Abstinence is the worst form of perversion.

The secret is not to betray your ignorance. Just maneuver, avoid the quicksands and obstacles, and the rest can be found in a dictionary.

The essence of life is the smile of round female bottoms, under the shadow of cosmic boredom.

Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship’s captain has to avoid a shipwreck.

…A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

History, that excitable and unreliable old lady.

I said, ‘If other beings besides us exist on Earth, why didn’t we meet them a long time ago?

You must render: never report.

Love is always love, come whence it may. A heart that beats at your approach, an eye that weeps when you go away are things so rare, so sweet, so precious that they must never be despised.

A lawful kiss is never worth as much as a stolen one.

You’ll find that my coquetry is quite impartial, which allows me to keep my friends.

A sick thought can devour the body’s flesh more than fever or consumption.

The English have only three sauces – a white one, a brown one and a yellow one, and none of them have any flavor whatever.

You’ve never lived until you’ve almost died. For those who have fought for it, life has a flavor the protected shall never know.

It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living.

Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.