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

Love men and women not for their strength but their softness, not for their fullness but their hunger, not for their plenty but their need.

Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing.

It takes courage to push yourself to places you have never been before... to test your limits... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to stay tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Most artists have retired too absolutely; they grow rusty, inflexible to the flow of currents.

I looked at it [revolver] as if it reminded me of a crime I had committed with an irrepressible smile such as rises sometimes to people’s lips in the face of great catastrophes which are beyond their grasp, the smile that comes at times on certain women’s faces while they are saying they regret the harm they have done. It is the smile of nature quietly and proudly asserting its natural right to kill.

But the artist persists because he has the will to create, and this is the magic power which can transform and transfigure and transpose and which will ultimately be transmitted to others.