Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer.

A man who lives unrelated to other human beings dies. But a man who lives unrelated to himself also dies.

although I love a rich life, I hate an overcrowded life. I believe in rumination and lose half the beauty of all things when I am deprived of the time to ruminate.

I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.

A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.

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.