Talent is a long patience.

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.

I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.

The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.

I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.

But some day sooner or later our passion would have cooled - inevitably - it's the way with everything human.