“It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.”

Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim.

There’s a virtue in slowness, which we have lost.

We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.

Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.

Sooner or later; one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.

It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.

Destruction after all is a form of creation.

An autobiography is only ‘a sort of life’ – it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.

Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in…We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.

Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.

Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil – or else an absolute ignorance.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.

Sick and tired of riots and blood.

I was born by myself but carry the spirit and blood of my father, mother and my ancestors. So I am really never alone. My identity is through that line.

We saw the lightning and that was the guns and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.

Hate is like a swordfish, working through water invisibly and then you see it coming with blood along its blade, but transparency disarms it.

A man who will enslave his own blood, may not be safely relied on for magnamity.

I have heard their groans and sighs, and seen their tears, and I would give every drop of blood in my veins to free them.

Blood was its Avatar and its seal.

It is mostly with your blood, Gala that I paint my pictures