Success is a consequence and must not be a goal. I've never sought it (though I desire it) and seek it less and less.

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.

If you knew all the dreams I've dreamed!

I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.

She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.

I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.

How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.