“As for an authentic villain, the real thing, the absolute, the artist, one rarely meets him even once in a lifetime. The ordinary bad hat is always in part a decent fellow.”

Don’t cudgel your brains over my little problems.

When she raises her eyelids it’s as if she were taking off all her clothes.

There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.

Time spent with a cat is never wasted.

By an image we hold on to our lost treasures, but it is the wrenching loss that forms the image, composes, binds the bouquet.

A woman who thinks she is intelligent demands the same rights as man. An intelligent woman gives up.

You do not notice changes in what is always before you.

Sincerity is not a spontaneous flower nor is modesty either.

Hope costs nothing.

In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge.

There are no ordinary cats.

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

I want nothing from love, in short, but love.

If I can’t have too many truffles, I’ll do without truffles.

I went to collect the few personal belongings which. I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.

My true friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I loved.