The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent...there must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

It is probable that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man.

I like the unreality of your mind; the whole thing is very splendid and voluptuous and absurd.

If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don’t admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers don’t do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one.

There'll be oceans of talk and emotions without end.

And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.