“What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.”

The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft.

Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose sombre depths turn us faint. And yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness.

Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.

Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.

I have dreamed much and have done very little.

She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.

The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.

To be simple is no small matter.

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

One’s duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

There are three thing in the world I love most: the sea, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni.

Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless.

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.