Selfishness is the grand moving principle of nine-tenths of our actions.

Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.

All women are flirts, but some are restrained by shyness, and others by sense.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.

There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.

Nothing hinders a thing from being natural so much as the straining ourselves to make it seem so.

Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.

Most people know no other way of judging men's worth but by the vogue they are in, or the fortunes they have met with.

There are no accidents so unlucky from which clever people are not able to reap some advantage, and none so lucky that the foolish are not able to turn them to their own disadvantage.

People seldom refuse help, if one offers it in the right way.

When you get into a hotel room, you lock the door, and you know there is a secrecy, there is a luxury, there is fantasy. There is comfort. There is reassurance.

I believe people can change, but only for the worse

Recognize your victories.

I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst. Death isn't just an idea.

History of science is a relay race, my painter friend. Copernicus took over his flag from Aristarchus, from Cicero, from Plutarch; and Galileo took that flag over from Copernicus.

I believe in racial memory too. I'm sure I've got ancient African blood in me that has something to do with what I am.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

In any man who dies there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight... Not people die but worlds die in them.

I never write. Never! I do not even remember if I can write.