the press is too often a distorting mirror, which deforms the people and events it represents, making them seem bigger or smaller than they really are.

One nourishes one's created characters with one's own substance: it's rather like the process of gestation. To give the character life, or to give him back life, it is of course necessary to fortify him by contributing something of one's own humanity, but it doesn't follow from that that the character is I, the writer, or that I am the character. The two entities remain distinct.

I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.

Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die; it does not make the departure more easy, but ease is not what I seek. Beloved boy, so willful and brooding, your sacrifice will have enriched not my life but my death. ... Centuries as yet unborn within the dark womb of time would pass by thousands over that tomb without restoring life to him, but likewise without adding to his death, and without changing the fact that he had been.

[On travel:] Who would be so besotted as to die without having made at least the round of this, his prison?

A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.

Any truth creates a scandal.