Any marriage worth the name is no better than a series of beginnings - many of them abortive.

to grow old is to have taken away, one by one, all gifts of life, the food and wine, the music and the company. ... the gods unloose, one by one, the mortal fingers that cling to the edge of the table.

The older I grow the more sharply I mistrust words. So few of them have any meaning left. It is impossible to write one sentence in which every word has the bareness and hardness of bones, the reality of the skeleton.

There is only one world; the world pressing against you at this minute. There is only one minute in which you are alive; this minute here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.

Sadistic literature is not only inhumane. It is anti-human.

When you talk of revolution ... you never talk of the day after.

each time that I have run away - and from a habit it quickly became an illness - I have betrayed someone. Myself, but not always only myself.