Art must take reality by surprise.

It amused me to think that one can tell the truth when one is drunk and nobody will believe it.

Love is worth whatever it costs.

A Strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me but now I am almost ashamed of it's complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.

I've read Proust and Stendhal. That keeps you in your place.

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.

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