[The artist] is like a pump; he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.

Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments.

Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.