Translating is writing.

I think still that someone wiser than I might well have remained happy till his death.

All happiness is a work of art: the smallest error falsifies it, the slightest hesitation alters it, the least heaviness spoils it, the slightest stupidity brutalizes it.

Any truth creates a scandal.

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

nothing is slower than the true birth of a man

The landscape of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pell-mell. There I see my nature, itself composite, made up of equal parts of instinct and training. Here and there protrude the granite peaks of the inevitable, but all about is rubble from the landslips of chance.