A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.

The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

A man's dying is more his survivor's affair than his own.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

Speech is civilization itself.

The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity.

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.