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

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

I go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then I recover and go from prostration to Fury, so that my average state is one of being annoyed.

He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides

It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.

What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the innerforce of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air--a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible.

Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar.