It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.

I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.

I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.

Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie.

Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.

A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.

Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.

The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time... love lavished on absolute fools. Love's a charity ward, you know.

A city becomes a world when one loves one of it's inhabitants.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.