Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.

Nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman

Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

Nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman - or the want of it in the man

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.