And what's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it's always daisy-time.

Only the desert has a fascination--to ride alone--in the sun in the forever unpossessed country--away from man. That is a great temptation.

The peasants of Sicily, who have kept their own wheat and make their own natural brown bread, ah, it is amazing how fresh and sweet and clean their loaf seems, so perfumed, as home-made bread used all to be before the war.

If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge Driven by invisible blows, The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.

The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.

Can you understand how cruelly I feel the lack of friends who will believe in me a bit?

So long as you don't feel life's paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn't matter, happiness or unhappiness.