There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it

Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

My God, this novel makes me break out in a cold sweat! Do you know how much I've written in five months, since the end of August? Sixty-five pages! Each paragraph is good in itself and there are some pages that are perfect. I feel certain. But just because of this, it isn't getting on. It's a series of well-turned, ordered paragraphs which do not flow on from each other. I shall have to unscrew them, loosen the joints, as one does with the masts of a ship when one wants the sail to take more wind.

One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.

You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.

Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.

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.