“It’s a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.”

One mustn’t ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

A friend who dies, it’s something of you who dies.

The future is the worst thing about the present.

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

Read in order to live.

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.

What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

Talent is nothing but long patience.

Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.

The principal thing in this world is to keep one’s soul aloft.

I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.