Others

There is a pleasure in poetic pains Which only poets know.

Passion makes the best observations and draws the most wretched conclusions.

A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.

A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.

A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife, who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn. Or perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of the duck unserved.

When you’re a novelist, you’re writing a play but you’re acting all the parts, you’re controlling the lights and the scenery and the whole business, and it’s your show.

When you’re a novelist, you’re writing a play but you’re acting all the parts, you’re controlling the lights and the scenery and the whole business, and it’s your show.

How many of us have been incited to reason, have first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life by some dazzling aphorism.

An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half.

Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing.

Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

Music is only love looking for words.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Who hears music, feels his solitude Peopled at once.

Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.

Mistakes live in the neighborhood of truth and therefore delude us.