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.

You live out the confusions until they become clear.

That is my essential reason for writing, not for fame, not to be celebrated after death, but to heighten and create life all around me. I also write because when I am writing I reach the high moment of fusion sought by the mystics, the poets, the lovers, a sense of communion with the universe.

I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.

The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything.

I want to hear raucous music, to see faces, to brush against bodies, to drink fiery Benedictine. Beautiful women and handsome men arouse fierce desires in me. I want to dance. I want drugs. I want to know perverse people, to be intimate with them. I never look at naive faces. I want to bite into life, and to be torn by it.

Memory is a great betrayer.