What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.

I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen.

Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.

Buying is a profound pleasure.

Every time I start on a new book, I am a beginner again. I doubt myself, I grow discouraged, all the work accomplished in the past is as though it never was, my first drafts are so shapeless that it seems impossible to go on with the attempt at all, right up until the moment - always imperceptible, there, too, there is a break - when it is has become impossible not to finish it.

Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence.

In order to be an artist, one must be deeply rooted in the society.