when the German propaganda tries to be winsome it is like a clown with homicidal mania - ludicrous and terrifying both at once.

... Rembrandt is not a painter at all. He is a creator, who creates his beings, three dimensional living beings, on a two-dimensional flat surface which acts as a mute, and enforces silence on them.

The Church has lost a great religious poet in me; but I have lost an infinity of fun in the church, so the loss is even.

In the morning I had decided that henceforth I only cared for easy loves. It is so degrading to have to persuade people into liking one, or one's works.

I wish I could write librettos for the rest of my life. It is the purest of human pleasures, a heavenly hermaphroditism of being both writer and musician. No wonder that selfish beast Wagner kept it all to himself.

I realize that it is as one ages and loses one's natural force that one is at the mercy of heredity. The young are themselves: the aging, their parents' children.

General de Gaulle is again pictured in our newspapers, looking as usual like an embattled codfish.