An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.

I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.

Love is poetry plus biology.

Music is only love looking for words.

It is hard to fight with one’s heart’s desires; whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of the soul.

We should tackle reality in a slightly jokey way, otherwise we miss its point.

How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.

It is a pity indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values. You do not need a sixth sense for it. It is there if you just close your eyes and...

You see, nothing matters except pleasure – which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.

I have done so many things in my life,” she said to the mirror. “Evil things, perhaps. But never unattentively, never wastefully…was I wrong?

People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.

Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?

we who have travelled much and loved much: we who have — I will not say suffered for we have always recognized through suffering our own self-sufficiency — only we appreciate the complexities of tenderness,...

Poverty is a great cutter-off and riches a great shutter-off.

Art—the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory.

Art like life is an open secret.

I love the French edition with its uncut pages. I would not want a reader too lazy to use a knife on me.