One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the innerforce of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air--a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible.

The citadel of Machaerus rose east of the Dead Sea on a basalt Peak shaped like a cone, girdled by four deep valleys; two about its sides, one in front, and the fourth behind.

Be orderly and disciplined in daily life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wild and violent in my art.

(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.

By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream

The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion; emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.