Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.

If our elaborate and dominating bodies are given us to be denied at every turn, if our nature is always wrong and wicked, how ineffectual we are; like fishes not meant to swim.

Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.

We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility.

Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.

While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.

When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.