I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.

The first concern of any dictatorship is, consequently, to subjugate both labor and culture.

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

Between history and the eternal I have chosen history because I like certainties. Of it, at least, I am certain, and how can I deny this force crushing me.

In this respect, our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they have taken no precautions.

The most exhausting effort in my life has been to suppress my own nature in order to make it serve my biggest plans.

Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.