“It is not I who am strong, it is reason, it is truth.”

She might have liked to try to strangle him with those slender fingers of hers, but she wanted to make a job of it and this great patience with which she waited for her claws to grow was in itself a form of enjoyment.

Governments are suspicious of literature because it is a force that eludes them.

Don’t go looking at me like that because you’ll wear your eyes out.

Perfection is such a nuisance that I often regret having cured myself of using tobacco.

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.

Let us eat, drink and satisfy our coarse appetites, but let us keep our souls sacred and apart.

I am spending delightful afternoons in my garden, watching everything living around me. As I grow older, I feel everything departing, and I love everything with more passion.

Violence has never prospered, you can’t remake the world in a day. Anyone who promises to change everything for you all at once is either a fool or a rogue!

I am an artist. I am here to live out loud.

The word realist means nothing to me, because I would subordinate reality to temperament. Give me what is true and I applaud; but give me what is individual and alive and I applaud even more.

If something’s just, I’ll let myself be hacked to bits for it.

They talked so, with secret hearts, without needing words, talking of other things. They could have suddenly continued their confessions aloud, without ceasing to understand each other.

If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.

In love as in speculation there is much filth; in love also, people think only of their own gratification; yet without love there would be no life, and the world would come to an end.

When sometimes, behind his back, they called him a tyrant, he merely smiled and uttered this profound observation: If some day I turn liberal, they will say I have let them down.

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.

What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.

Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.

The time has come for people of reason to say: Enough is Enough! Religious faith discourages independent thought, it’s divisive and it’s dangerous.

I have experienced failure as a politician and for that very reason, I am ready to give everything for Japan.

I can be reasonably funny and light-hearted when I’m in the company of good friends, but I’m not a jokesmith. I tend to be quite serious.

To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable.

Without love, there is no reason to know anyone, for love will in the end connect us to our neighbors, our children and our hearts.

The deeper I go in considering the vanities of popular reasoning, the lighter and more foolish I find them.