“The one thing I regret is that I will never have time to read all the books I want to read.”

“The questions I would have liked to ask people were: ‘Are you in love? What are you reading?”

“My love of pleasure seems to be the only consistent side of my character. Is it because I have not read enough?”

“A Strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me but now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.”

“He refused categorically all ideas of fidelity or serious commitments. He explained that they were arbitrary and sterile. From anyone else such views would have shocked me, but I knew that in his case they did not exclude tenderness and devotion - feelings which came all the more easily to him since he was determined that they should be transient.”

“I have loved to the point of madness; that which is called madness, that which to me, is the only sensible way to love.”

“I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.”