The compensation for a death sentence is knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned.

Imagination: the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature.

The moral sense in mortals is the duty we have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.

Adultery is the most conventional way to rise above the conventional.

The evening is the time to praise the day.

Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist

She might be a little introverted, livelier of movement than of conversation, neither bashful nor forward, with a soul that seemed submerged, but in a radiant moistness. Opalescent on the surface but translucent in her depths.

Direct interference in a person's life does not enter our scope of activity, nor, on the other, tralatitiously speaking, hand, is his destiny a chain of predeterminate links: some "future" events may be likelier than others, O.K., but all are chimeric, and every cause-and-effect sequence is always a hit-and-miss affair, even if the lunette has actually closed around your neck, and the cretinous crowd holds its breath.

Coincidence is a pimp and a cardsharper in ordinary fiction but a marvelous artist in the patterns of facts recollected by a non-o rdinary memorist.