This is my main shortcoming: I was so determined not to lose time that I often did the wrong thing. Not losing time has been my permanent concern since I was three years old, when it dawned on me that time is the warp of life, its very fabric, something that you cannot buy, trade, steal, falsify, or obtain by begging.

It looks now as if everything has been profitable to me. And if the payment has sometimes been excessive, it was afer all the payment, for life, and there cannot be and is no excessive payment for life.

[On New York:] ... a city rose before me. It was narrow and tall like a gothic temple, surrounded by water, and ... it suddenly appeared, as if with a slight push it detached itself out of the invisible into the visible.

The past is good (as we all know), twenty, thirty years back everything was good, anyone can tell you that.

[On Paris:] It exists, constant, eternal, surrounding us who live in it, and it is in us. We love it or hate it, but we cannot escape it. It is a circle of associations in which man exists, being himself a circle of associations. Having entered it and come out of it we are not what we were before knowing it: it devoured us, we devoured it, and the problem is not did we or didn't we want it. We consumed each other. It courses in our blood.

I had learnt to seek intensity — more of life, a concentrated sense of life.

my choices were partly conditioned by the two great laws - of biology and sociology - for I do not conceive of myself outside of them. ... Inside every biological and social situation I am free to make decisions.