To write is to descend, to excavate, to go underground.

Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.

I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me.

Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

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

Pain is something to master, not to wallow in.