It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.

A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among ruins. She had to extract a kind of personal advantage from things and she rejected as useless everything that promised no immediate gratification — for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery.

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.

Only three things are infinite. The sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.

It is an excellent habit to look at things as so many symbols.