The further you go in writing the more alone you are. Most of your best and oldest friends die. Others move away. You do not see them except rarely, but you write and have much the same contact with them as though you were together at the café in the old days. You exchange comic, sometimes cheerfully obscene and irresponsible letters, and it is almost as good as talking. But you are more alone because that is how you must work and the time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you feel you have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness.

I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

French is the language of diplomacy. Spanish is the language of bureaucracy.

If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

Let’s not talk about how I am. It’s a subject I know too much about to want to think about anymore.

Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.