Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.

And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.

Talent is long patience.

One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.

Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again.

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support.