The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.

I have a superstition that if I talk about plot, it's like letting sand out of a hole in the bottom of a bag.

Madness might sometimes give access to a kind of knowledge. But was not a guarantee.

A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing -- articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence.

Italians are never punctual; the café, the convenient place to wait, absolves them from that. There is no question of hanging about, no looking lost and unwanted or even disreputable, as there is in hotel lobbies or the foyers of restaurants. One just sits and enjoys the scene, and waits.

Perhaps if we lived with less physical beauty we would develop our true natures more.

It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.