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.

She was fully, painfully aware that very rarely did midnight strike in two hearts at once, very rarely did midnight arouse two different equal desires, and that any dislocation in this, any indifference, was an indication of disunity, of the difficulties, the impossibilities of fusion between two human beings.

Some people read to confirm their own hopelessness. Others read to be rescued from it.

For all of my patients sensuality is a giving in to 'the low side of their nature.' Puritanism is powerful and distorts their life with a total anesthesia of the senses. If you atrophy one sense, you also atrophy all the others, a sensuous and physical connection with nature, with art, with food, with other human beings.

If a person continues to see giants, it means he is still looking at the world through the eyes of a child.

Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.

When I stand at the top of the Champs-Elysées, with its chestnut trees in flower, its undulations of shining cars, its white spaciousness, I feel as if I were biting into a utopian fruit, something velvety and lustrous and rich and vivid.