Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you've lost that, you've lost everything.

…but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself; I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation.

Writing is a trade ... which is learned by writing.

If you haven't been happy very young, you can still be happy later on, but it's much harder. You need more luck.

I was very fond of Lagneau’s phrase: “I have no comfort but in my absolute despair.

Buying is a profound pleasure.

Between women love is contemplative; caresses are intended less to gain possession of the other than gradually to re-create the self through her; separateness is abolished, there is no struggle, no victory, no defeat; in exact reciprocity each is at once subject and object, sovereign and slave; duality become mutuality.