Tout ce qu'on invente est vrai, soi-en sure. La poesie est une chose aussi precise que la geometrie.

Coffee: Induces wit. Good only if it comes through Havre. After a big dinner party it is taken standing up. Take it without sugar - very swank: gives the impression you have lived in the East.

One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.

After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again.

The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.

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.

Snicker on hearing his name: 'the gentleman who thinks we are descended from the apes.'