I did not find him absurd. I saw he was kind, that he was on the verge of real love. I thought it would be nice for me to be in love with him, too.

One partner is always more in love than the other.

After Proust, there are certain things that simply cannot be done again. He marks off for you the boundaries of your talent.

Usually I avoided college students, whom I considered brutal, wrapped up in themselves, particularly in their youth, in which they found material for drama or an excuse for their own boredom. I did not care for young people.

People respect unhappiness and find it especially hard to forgive success.

Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.

No one talks about money more than people who have too much of it.