The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross: that it's to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish.

You would get longer livelier and more frequent letters from me, if it weren't for the Christian religion. How that bell tolling at the end of the garden, dum dum, dum dum, annoys me! Why is Christianity so insistent and so sad?

Without self awareness we are as babies in the cradles.

Among the tortures and devestations of life is this then - our friends are not able to finish their stories.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.