No one was ever born without that light or flame of life. Some event, some person stifles or drowns it altogether. I was always tempted to resuscitate such men by my own joyousness or luminosity.When I break glasses in a night club, as the Russians do, when my unconscious breaks out in wild rebellions, it is against life which has crippled these idealistic, romantic men. I respect these men, cold, pure, faithful, devoted, moral, delicate, sensitive, and unequal to life, more than I respect the tough-minded ones who return three blows to one received, who kill those who hurt them.

Love men and women not for their strength but their softness, not for their fullness but their hunger, not for their plenty but their need.

Not afraid of poverty and drabness and who is untouched by it, untouched by the drunkenness of her friends; (she) who judges, selects, discards people with severity, who knows, when she is telling her endless anecdotes, that they are ways of escape, keeping herself all the more secret behind that profuse talk.

I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly.

We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.

Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.

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