Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. And then love will come to you, then it comes to you.

jazz is the expression of America's romantic self, its sensual potency, its lyrical force.

Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.

I find that life, day by day, is composed of at least one joy, one problem and one sorrow. Then there are the smaller ingredients: you always learn something, whether useful or harmful - that is difficult to analyze until later; you always give something; you alwayou always grow a little in one direction or another.

I must know, he thinks. It must be clear to me. There is a world which is closed to him, a world of shadings, gradations, nuances, and subtleties. He is a genius and yet he is too explicit. June slips between his fingers. You cannot posses without loving.

I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.

In my childhood diary I wrote: “I have decided that it is better not to love anyone, because when you love people, then you have to be separated from them, and that hurts too much.