Doesn't the theory of relativity concern literature too? In our world there is no longer any room for the privileged observer, as there is none for the observer of the universe - we are all within.

Pearls ... have a way of dying when separated from their owner.

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 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 rather than happiness, not joys and prosperity but more of life, a concentrated sense of life, a strengthened feeling of existence, fullness and concentration of pulse, energy, growth, flowering, beyond the image of happiness or unhappiness.

The idea came to me that I was, am, and will be, but perhaps will not become. This did not scare me. There was for me in being an intensity I did not feel in becoming.

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