Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.

Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.

Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.

Every love has a poetic relevance of its own; each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter.

Silences can be as different as sounds.

As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.