“Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.”

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.

Art and psychoanalisis give shape and meaning to life and that’s why we adore them. However, life as it is lived has no shape nor meaning, and that’s what I am experiencing right now.

But one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.

We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.

Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.

Every persisting marriage is based on fear’, said Peregrine. ‘Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what’s at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower.

Only take someone’s hand in a certain way, even look into their eyes in a certain way, and the world is changed forever.

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart.

I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.

What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.

Love doesn’t think like that. All right, it’s blind as a bat- Bats have radar. Yours doesnt seem to be working.

What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.

The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life’s most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.

From the neck up is where you win or lose the battle. It’s the art of war. You have to lock yourself in and strategise your mindset. That’s why boxers go to training camps: to shut down the noise and really zone in.

Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself.

Happiness is a little bit of art on a sad day.

Art is not communicative, art is not reflexive. Art, science, philosophy are neither contemplative, neither reflexive, nor communicative. They are creative, that’s all.

If reality impacted directly on our senses and our consciousness, if we could have direct communication between the material world and ourselves, art would be unnecessary.

Arts can save children, no matter what’s going on in their homes.

I know that my son was an honest person and an honest artist, and what he gave from himself through his art was the depth of his humanity.

Philosophy, art, and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject.