What matters most is not the idea, but the capacity to believe in it completely.

It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.

I think an alliance with Stalin's Russia is rotten.

Glance is the enemy of vision.

The real meditation is ... the meditation on one's identity. Ah, voilà une chose!! You try it. You try finding out why you're you and not somebody else. And who in the blazes are you anyhow? Ah, voilà une chose!

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron.... I should have been able to do better.

I have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak that is paradise. Let the Gods forgive what I have made Let those I love try to forgive what I have made.