When I don't write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.

In music I feel most deeply the passing of things.

Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing.

There is no denying that we are suffering from a collective neurosis and the novel which does not face this is not a novel of our time.

We speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels. It is really more a matter of poetry versus intellectualization.

I have seen romanticism outlast the realistic. I have seen men forget the beautiful women they have possessed, forget the prostitutes, and remember the first woman they idolized, the woman they could never have. The woman who aroused them romantically holds them.

Expressing feelings is linked directly with creation... In this ability to tap the sources of feeling and imagination lies the secret of abundance.