 Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist. |
| Music is only love looking for words. |
| It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else. |
| Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened. |
| Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked. |
| A city becomes a world when one loves one of it's inhabitants. |
| The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time... love lavished on absolute fools. Love's a charity ward, you know. |
| Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other. |
| I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything. |
| Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection. |
| No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat. |
| For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination. |
| The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time. |
| I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know. |
| A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying. |
| Truth disappears with the telling of it. |
| History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living. |
| We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it. |
| Our inventions mirror our secret wishes. |
| There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature. |
