A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.

I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.

Be orderly and disciplined in daily life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wild and violent in my art.

But the most wretched thing, is it not-is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice.

The morality of art is in its very beauty.

What an elder sees sitting; the young can't see standing.

It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.