I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.

You know that you can't make references to the Classics any longer and less and less to the English classics even.

I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really under way, I don't want to do anything else. I don't go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. It's a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I'm too interested in many other things.

The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

Now the new things happening in France don't interest me.