The bicycle is a great good. But it can turn nasty, if ill employed.

Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence.

There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.

Silence, yes, but what silence! For it is all very fine to keep silence, but one has also to consider the kind of silence one keeps.

Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned.

Enough of acting the infant who has been told so often how he was found under a cabbage that in the end he remembers the exact spot in the garden and the kind of life he led there before joining the family circle.

Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.