"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time."

"Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked."

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

"There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature."

"Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection."

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

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

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

"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."

"Music was invented to confirm human loneliness."

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

"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."

"Our inventions mirror our secret wishes."

"It is not love that is blind, but jealousy."

"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."

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

"Music is only love looking for words."

"Truth disappears with the telling of it."

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

"We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it."