Writing was a chimney for my blazing ambitions.

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

My mind is not suited to go much into company.

What I do not know and cannot even hope to understand before I die is why human beings are willfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to each other ... What nerve has atrophied in the torturer, or worse is sensually moved?

For what I have received may the Lord make me truly thankful. And more truly for what I have not received.

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

... I used words without precautions. I wanted to disappear into them, I fled into the bovaryism of the writer trying to create an effect.