I have this weird obsession about buying books and looking at them with a smile, even if I won't read them soon. At least they are mine now.

They courted the face on the screen, the face of translucence, the face of wax on which men found it possible to imprint the image of their fantasy.

The value of the personal relationship to all things is that it creates intimacy and intimacy creates understanding and understanding creates love.

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living.

Sometimes I think of Paris not as a city but as a home.

He had a mania for washing and disinfecting himself. . . . For him the only danger came from the microbes that attacked the body. He had not studied the microbe of conscience which eats into the soul.

I looked upon a clock to find the truth. The hours were passing like ivory chess figures, striking piano notes, and the minutes raced on wires mounted like tin soldiers. Hours like tall ebony women with gongs between their legs, tolling continuously so that I could not count them. I heard the rolling of my heart-beats; I heard the footsteps of my dreams, and the beat of time was lost among them like the face of truth.