At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty, doggedly, desperately. For once you have committed yourself to a particular work, inspiration changes its form and becomes an obsession, like a love-affair… which haunts you night and day! Once at grips with a work, we must master it completely before we can recover our idleness.

I do not understand those who spend hours at the theater watching scenes between people whom they would not listen to for five minutes in real life.

Would that well-thinking people should be replaced by thinking ones.

We are nearly all composed of such a complex mixture of human qualities that in each one of us reside both masculine and feminine principles: what man is without any female attribute and what woman never demonstrates any masculine characteristics?

Avoid that romantic trap: saying more than you feel, forcing yourself to feel more than you've said!

Our shadows are taller than ourselves.

To think about and prepare for war is boring, boring for everyone. It's being locked in barracks.