A kiss without a moustache, they said then, is like an egg without salt; I will add to it: and it is like Good without Evil.

An individual chooses and makes himself.

So it comes to this; one doesn’t need rest. Why bother about sleep if one isn’t sleepy? That stands to reason, doesn’t it? Wait a minute, there’s a snag somewhere; something disagreeable. Why, now, should it be disagreeable? …Ah, I see; it’s life without a break.

I needed to justify my existence, and I had made an absolute of literature. It took me thirty years to get rid of this state of mind.

Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the of it is nothing other than the sense you choose.

Outside nature, against nature, without excuse, beyond remedy, except what remedy I find within myself.

I am finishing a biography of [Gustave] Flaubert. Because he is the opposite of what I am. One needs to rub up against argument.