... there was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war.

I rarely believe anything, because at the time of believing I am not really there to believe.

I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, everybody said that she does not look like it, but that does not make any difference, she will, he said.

I like loving. I like mostly all the ways one can have of having loving feelings in them. Slowly it has come to be in me that any way of being a loving one is interesting and not unpleasant to me.

it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.

A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.

If things happen all the time you are never nervous. It is when they are not happening that you are nervous.