Go on loving what is good, simple, and ordinary.

Life + a cat ... adds up to an incalculable sum.

The artist's experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss.

I don't want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.

No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.

And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrassed, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers-perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.