In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.

Death persecutes before it executes.

Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.

We were born to die; we were born to endure, on the way to death, sorrow-sorrow in manifold shapes.

If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.

The butterfly lures us not only because he is beautiful, but because he is transitory. The caterpillar is uglier, but in him we can regard the better joy of becoming.

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.