I believe that all true art is classic, but the dictates of the mind rarely permit of its being recognized as such when it first appears.

Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language.

To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator.

We exist only by virtue of what we possess, we possess only what is really present to us, and many of our memories, our moods, our ideas sail away on a voyage of their own until they are lost to sight! Then we can no longer take them into account in the total which is our personality. But they know of secret paths by which to return to us.

We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.

For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.

What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.