Not necessarily narrow so much as impatient, intense.

Love must wait; it must break one’s bones.

Being somebody: it's one of the ideas in life, no? That's what my father made clear to me. The importance of being somebody. He wanted to be somebody. And he underlined to me the fate of trying to be somebody and not quite managing to do it.

We were moderate, we will never know what it is to spill out our lives.

I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.You could claim that it's due to my military experience. But it came before that. I love their freedom of behavior. They're not constrained by penal attitudes, puritanical attitudes about behavior, both socially and morally. They have a freedom that I admire. An unquestioned freedom.

You can write about other people and their ideas and life without having lived it, but even your perception of that is going to be colored by what you know and what you experience. And this is undeniable.

Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only? I am referring to certain landscapes, persons, beasts, books, rooms, meteorological conditions, fruits.