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.

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.

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

Men who care passionately for women attach themselves at least as much to the temple and to the accessories of the cult as to their goddess herself.

I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily

Translating is writing.

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.