“When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.”

All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.

From someone who doesn’t want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette.

We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest.

Don’t mix wine and women.

You don’t remember days, you remember moments.

Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.

All our “most sacred affections ” are merely prosaic habit.

Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one’s own loneliness, how to communicate with others.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.

The only reason why we are always thinking of our own ego is that we have to live with it more continuously than with anyone else’s.

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.

The world, the future, is now within you as your past, as experience, skill in technique, and the rich, everlasting mystery is found to be childish you that, at the time, you made no effort to possess.

You are the author of your life, so go out and live! Then never quit writing about it!

Well yeah, there’s definitely going to be a little bit of the author in that. But there’s nothing wrong with that.

When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we’ll be funnier to look at than to read.

Shakespeare feels very natural to me.

The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement which glued his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts.

The faults of great authors are generally excellences carried to an excess.

Socrates said, our only knowledge was “To know that nothing could be known;” a pleasant Science enough, which levels to an ass Each Man of Wisdom, future, past, or present.

Prejudice is the sole author of infamies: how many acts are so qualified by an opinion forged out of naught but prejudice!