Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.

The fiery moments of passionate experience are the moments of wholeness and totality of the personality.

He has, like me, a sense of smell. I let him inhale me, then I slip away.

Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.

I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.

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.

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.