“Faith, I am no such fool; everyone for himself in this desert of selfishness which is called life.”

One of the traits of genius is not to drag its thought through the rut worn by vulgar minds.

The first virtue of a young man today – that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its powers – is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains.

Love has always been the most important business in my life; I should say the only one.

At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.

Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.

This religion takes away the courage of thinking of unusual things and prohibits self-examination above all as the most egregious of sins. It is one step away from protestantism.

Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.

It is with blows dealt by public contempt that a husband kills his wife in the nineteenth century; it is by shutting the doors ofall the drawing-rooms in her face.

Your career will be a painful one. I divine something in you which offends the vulgar.

The only unhappiness is a life of boredom.

In matters of sentiment, the public has very crude ideas; and the most shocking fault of women is that they make the public the supreme judge of their lives.

She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?

To find love in Paris you must go down among those classes where the absence of education and of vanity, and the struggle for bare necessities, have allowed more energy to survive.

Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.

One-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

The extremes of jungles, mountains, and deserts are inherently dangerous places.

The rules of survival never change, whether you’re in a desert or in an arena.

I read recently that I was born in Arizona. I wasn’t born in Arizona. I was born in New Mexico, but I can understand why people might confuse those two Southwestern desert states.

A desert is a place without expectation.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

As drivers desert the city I find myself clinging more and more to my father’s belief that a man without a car is not really a man.

A writer is someone who has a one-man tent in the desert and occasionally he sees the footprint of an other writer – in the form of a review or something.