He refused categorically all ideas of fidelity or serious commitments. He explained that they were arbitrary and sterile. From anyone else such views would have shocked me, but I knew that in his case they did not exclude tenderness and devotion - feelings which came all the more easily to him since he was determined that they should be transient.

You should celebrate the end of a love affair as they celebrate death in New Orleans, with songs, laughter, dancing and a lot of wine.

Life has confirmed for me the thoughts and impressions I had when I was 18, as if it was all intuition.

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

There is no such thing as an ideal man. The ideal man is the man you love at the moment.

I like men to behave like men. I like them strong and childish.

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.