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

Love is a punishment. We are punished for not having been strong enough to remain alone.

Every hour has its immediate duty, its special injunction which dominates all others.

Any truth creates a scandal.

And nevertheless I have loved certain of my masters, and those strangely intimate though elusive relations existing between student and teacher, and the Sirens singing somewhere within the cracked voice of him who is first to reveal a new idea. The greatest seducer was not Alcibiades, afterall, it was Socrates.

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.

nothing is slower than the true birth of a man