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

We breathe love as we breathe air; we hold it in ourselves as we hold our thoughts. Nothing more exists for us.

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.