No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.

I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.

All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness.

after all the work of the philosophers on his soul and the doctors on his body, what can we really say we know about a man? That he is, when all is said and done, just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh.

Truth is a woman. That is why it is enigmatic.

These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.

The realisation of one's own death is the point at which one becomes adult.