Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.

One must laugh and weep, love, work, enjoy and suffer, in short vibrate as much as possible in all his being.

The rage for wanting to conclude is one of the most deadly and most fruitless manias to befall humanity. Each religion and each philosophy has pretended to have God to itself, to measure the infinite, and to know the recipe for happiness. What arrogance and what nonsense! I see, to the contrary, that the greatest geniuses and the greatest works have never concluded.

Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.

Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

She remembered the heroines of novels she had read, and the lyrical legion of those adulterous women began to sing in her memory with sisterly voices that enchanted her. Now she saw herself as one of those amoureuses whom she had so envied: she was becoming, in reality, one of that gallery of fictional figures; the long dream of her youth was coming true.

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