Any truth creates a scandal.

The world is big … May it please the One who perchance is to expand the human heart to life's full measure.

I don't think I ever relinquish a person I have known, and surely not my fictional characters. I see them, I hear them, with a clarity that I would call hallucinatory if hallucination didn't mean something else ... A character whom we create can never die, any more than a friend can die ... Through [my characters] I've lived many parallel lives.

One reads thousands of books, of poets, modern and ancient, as one meets thousands of people. What remains of it all is hard to tell.

Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul.

Passion such as hers is all consent, asking little in return. I had merely to enter a room where she was to see her face take on that peaceful expression of one who is resting in bed. If I touched her, I had the impression that all the blood in her veins was turning to honey.

This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?