If I fall asleep, it is because I am overloaded. I sleep because one hour with Henry contains five years of my life, and one phrase, one caress answers the expectations of a hundred nights. When I hear him laugh, I say, "I have heard Rabelais.". And I swallow his laughter like bread and wine.

In New York the acoustics are good for laughter, for life is all external, all action, no thought, no meditation, no dreaming, no reflection, only the exuberance of action.

The period without the diary remains an ordeal. Every evening I want my diary as one wants opium.

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

We cannot cure the evils of politics with politics.

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

The obstacle became his alibi for weakness.