My love of pleasure seems to be the only consistent side of my character. Is it because I have not read enough?

For this was the round of love: fear which leads on desire, tenderness and fury, and that brutal anguish which triumphantly follows pleasure.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

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

Money may not buy happiness, but I'd rather cry in a Jaguar than on a bus.

For what are we looking for if not to please? I do not know if the desire to attract others comes from a superabundance of vitality, possessiveness, or the hidden, unspoken need to be reassured.

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.