The raw tomato, devoured in the garden when freshly picked, is a horn of abundance of simple sensations, a radiating rush in one's mouth that brings with it every pleasure. . . . a tomato, an adventure.

Tasting is an act of pleasure and writing about that pleasure is an artistic gesture, but the only true work of art, in the end, is another person's feast.

To beauty, all is forgiven, even vulgarity. Intelligence no longer seems an adequate compensation for things.

The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects.

But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.

In the end, I wonder if the true movement of the world might not be a voice raised in song.

I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.