You've never lived until you've almost died. For those who have fought for it, life has a flavor the protected shall never know.

...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

The essence of life is the smile of round female bottoms, under the shadow of cosmic boredom.

Travel, like dreams, is a door that opens from the real world into a world that is yet to be discovered

There are some delightful places in this world which have a sensual charm for the eyes. One loves them with a physical love. We people who are attracted by the countryside cherish fond memories of certain springs, certain woods, certain ponds, certain hills, which have become familiar sights and can touch our hearts like happy events. Sometimes indeed the memory goes back towards a forest glade, or a spot on a river bank or an orchard in blossom, glimpsed only once on a happy day, but preserved in our heart.

Whether we are describing a king, an assassin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stallholder in a market, it is always ourselves that we are describing.

I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt.