The questions I would have liked to ask people were: ‘Are you in love? What are you reading?

I've often found myself preferring second-rate people to supposedly superior people, simply and solely because of their uncontrollable tendency to bang themselves against the sides of life's vast lampshade like fireflies or moths.

curiosity is the beginning of wisdom.

Art must take reality by surprise.

There is a certain age when a woman must be beautiful to be loved, and then there comes a time when she must be loved to be beautiful.

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.

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