Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.

immortality is a terrible curse.

I think that where you go wrong is that you imagine that your reasons for living ought to fall on you, ready-made from heaven, whereas we have to find them for ourselves.

Anais Nin shows an occasional grace in writing, but her work is quite foreign to me, precisely because she wants so much to be feminine and not feminist. And then she is so gaga before so many men. She talks about men I know in France, men who were less than nothing, and she considers them kings, extraordinary people.

It is not mere chance that makes families speak of a child who is 'extraordinary for his age' and also of an old man who is 'extraordinary for his age'; the extraordinariness lies in their behaving like human beings when they are either not yet or no longer men.

To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.

I went to get a detective story. You have to kill time. But time will kill me too - and there´s the true, preestablished balance.