We love best those who are, or act for us, a self we do not wish to be or act out.

The child in me could not die as it should have died, because according too legends it must find its father again. The old legends knew, perhaps, that in absence the father becomes glorified, deified, eroticized, and this outrage against God the Father has to be atoned for. The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless.

Our psychological reality, which lies below the surface, frightens us because it endlessly surprises us and drives us in a direction which society's rules and organizations define as wrong or dangerous.

When I don't write, I feel my world shrink. I lose my fire, my color.

[On Paris:] A city never entirely known, yet which gives you the feeling of intimacy, of possessing it intimately.

What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion but a way of life which produces, as in the mystics, an ecstatic awareness of the whole of life.

Secrets. Need to disguise. The novel was born of this.