The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.

What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? There had been addition and subtraction in my life, but how much multiplication?

Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?

You grew old first not in your own eyes, but in other people's eyes; then, slowly, you agreed with their opinion of you.

we must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death