“Only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love the world.”

Science is history arranged according to the superstition and taste of the moment. The vocabulary of scholars has no wit, no salt. These heavy tomes have no soul, they are filled with distress.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

I used the word ‘prose’ in the Trans-Siberian in the early Latin sense of prosa dictu. Poem seemed to me too pretentious, too narrow. Prose is more open, popular.

It seemed to me that I was coming out of a suffocating nightmare and that the low clouds flying before the wind were the shreds of an evil dream.

One’s life, from being an exterior thing, grows inwards. Its intensity stays the same; and, d’you know, it’s most mysterious, the corners in which the joy of living can sometimes hide away.

The single fact of existing is already a true happiness.

A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be.