There are books which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty.

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.

In the evenings the art of building gave way to that of music, which is architecture, too, though invisible.

If you love life you also love the past, because it is the present as it has survived in memory." Translation by David Downie

But happiness is brittle, and if men and circumstances don't destroy it, it is threatened by ghosts.

Writing is a perpetual choice between a thousand expressions, none of which satisfies me, none of which, above all, satisfies me without the others. Yet I ought to know that only music permits a succession of chords.

I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.