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

When I hear of people who weary of each other, I believe it is because they have sought virtues in themselves alone, attractions of physical beauty. Have they based their love on each other's thoughts? Who can weary of thoughts which change every day?

I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife. I think highly of faithfulness. But my temperament belongs to the writer, not to the woman

The theme of the diary is always the personal, but it does not mean only a personal story: it means a personal relationship to all things and people. The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualise. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive elements of discovery. Music, dance, poetry and painting are the channels for emotion. It is through them that experience penetrates our bloodstream.

I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have shared my kingdom with you.

I have so strong a sense of creation, of tomorrow, that I cannot get drunk, knowing I will be less alive, less well, less creative the next day.

Strange, isn't it, that no chemical will give a human being the iridescence that illusions have given them? Give me your hat.