Yes, one day I found myself writing down with trembing fingers the four words with which every story-teller since the world began has staked his slender claim to the attention of his fellow-men. Words which presage simply the old story of an artist coming of age. I wrote: 'Once upon a time...
You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.
I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.
The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.
A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.
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.
Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.
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.
Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.
Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.
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.
