Lessons are not given, they are taken.

Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.

You need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. A village means that you are not alone, knowing that in the people, the trees, the earth, there is something that belongs to you, waiting for you when you are not there.

The only joy in the world is to begin.

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.