To be the equal of reality you must learn how to ignore it without danger.

The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you.

But I love to feel events overlapping each other, crawling over one another like wet crabs in a basket

The steward, according to custom, had stopped all the clocks. This, in the language of Narouz, said "Your stay with us is so brief, let us not be reminded of the flight of the hours."

Of women, the most we can say, not being Frenchmen, is that they are burrowing animals.

How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.

The whole Mediterranean, the sculpture, the palm, the gold beads, the bearded heroes, the wine, the ideas, the ships, the moonlight, the winged gorgons, the bronze men, the philosophers - all of it seems to rise in the sour, pungent taste of these black olives between the teeth. A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.