These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.

It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close.... There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write.

The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.

We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.

Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.

Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.

To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.