You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.

- and how time flies! What, has it already been twenty years, already forty years that we are together? Why, how terrible! We haven't yet said all we wanted to say to each other... May we have a little respite, or else may we be allowed to begin all over again!

I want nothing from love, in short, but love.

To write is to pour one’s innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one’s hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god which guides it - and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower.

The faults of husbands are often caused by the excess virtues of their wives.

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

When she raises her eyelids it's as if she were taking off all her clothes.