"I'm dazzled by your facility. In ten days you'll have written six stories! I don't understand it. I'm like one of those old aqueducts: there's so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop."

"As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky."

"Sadness is a vice."

"The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois."

"Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars."

"Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times."

"The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments."

"Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation."

"It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling."

"He had the vanity to believe men did not like him " while men simply did not know him."

"Then he remembered his wedding, the old times, the first pregnancy of his wife; he, too, had been very happy the day when he had taken her from her father to his home, and had carried her off on a pillion, trotting through the snow, for it was near Christmas-time, and the country was all white. She held him by one arm, her basket hanging from the other; the wind blew the long lace of her Cauchois headdress so that it sometimes flapped across his mouth, and when he turned his head he saw near him, on his shoulder, her little rosy face, smiling silently under the gold bands of her cap. To warm her hands she put them from time to time in his breast. How long ago it all was! Their son would have been thirty by now. Then he looked back and saw nothing on the road."

"Success is a consequence and must not be a goal."

"The hearts of women are like those little pieces of furniture with secret hiding - places, full of drawers fitted into each other; you go to a lot of trouble, break your nails, and in the bottom find some withered flower, a few grains of dust - or emptiness!"

"Exuberance is better than taste."

"In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he grew older, he lost his taste for them, but the excellent authors just didn't fill him with the same enthusiasm."

"By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream."

"Books aren't made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it's back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison."

"Indeed, for the last three years, he had carefully avoided her, as a result of the natural cowardice so characteristic of the stronger sex..."

"God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world."

"Isn't 'not to be bored' one of the principal goals of life?"

"Read in order to live."

"You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word."

"An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."

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

"Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes."

"Read much, but not many books."

"My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real."

"If you participate in life, you don't see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubborness in denying that maxim."

"The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature."

"Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying."

"Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it."

"You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything."

"Travel, leave everything, copy the birds. The home is one of civilization's sadnesses."

"Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions."

"The public wants work which flatters its illusions."

"I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly."

"Not a lawyer but carries within him the debris of a poet."

"The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens."

"But her life was as cold as an attic facing north; and boredom, like a silent spider, was weaving its web in the shadows, in every corner of her heart."

"Deep down, all the while, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she kept casting desperate glances over the solitary waster of her life, seeking some white sail in the distant mists of the horizon. She had no idea by what wind it would reach her, toward what shore it would bear her, or what kind of craft it would be " tiny boat or towering vessel, laden with heartbreaks or filled to the gunwhales with rapture. But every morning when she awoke she hoped that today would be the day; she listened for every sound, gave sudden starts, was surprised when nothing happened; and then, sadder with each succeeding sunset, she longed for tomorrow."

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

"The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."

"Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul's possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common level."

"Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn't that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?"

"Doubt is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness."

"Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world."

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

"There is no truth. There is only perception."

"As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop."

"I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none."