Louis Couperus

“ When your suit gets old, you buy a new one: I'm speaking from the capitalist's point of view. But your body and soul you get once for all and you have to take them with you to the grave. If you economize with either of them, then you haven't lived, whereas, if you squander them, you have to pay for it.... And then that past, which you tow and trail along! Every day adds its inexorable quota. We are just mules, dragging along till we can go no farther and till we drop dead with the effort.... Oh, Elly, it's terrible! Think of those old people of to-day ! ”

“ Then why shouldn't I speak of authors as entertainers? They entertain themselves with their own sorrows and emotions; and with a melancholy sonnet or a more or less nebulous novel they entertain the young people who read them. For people over thirty, who are not in the trade, no longer read novels or poems. I myself am too old to write for young people. When I write now, I have the bourgeois ambition to be read by my contemporaries, by men getting on for forty. ”

“ Not much, I expect: their little ailments, the weather; people as old as that don't talk, they are numbed. They don't remember things. Their past is heavy with years and crushes them, gives them only a semblance of life, of the aftermath of life: they've had their life... ”

“ What interests them is actual life, seen psychologically, but expressed in concrete truths and not reflected in a mirage and poetized and dramatized through fictitious personages. That's why I'm a journalist and why I enjoy it. I like to grip my reader at once and to let him go again at once, because neither he nor I have any time to spare. Life goes on. ”

“ The best thing, Elly, is not to think of setting up house yet. Not with Mamma and also not by ourselves. Let us go on wandering. When we are very old it will be time enough to roost permanently. What draws me to Italy is her tremendous past. ”