In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude.
The man who was once starved may revenge himself upon the world not by stealing just once, or by stealing only what he needs, but by taking from the world an endless toll in payment of something irreplaceable, which is the lost faith.
I cheat him, I deceive him, yet the world does not sink in sulphur-colored mists. Madness conquers. I can no longer put my mosaics together. I just cry and laugh.
I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.
Things aren’t the way they are, they’re the way you are.
I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.
Whenever you do something that is not aligned with the yearning or your soul – you create suffering.
A war regarded as inevitable or even probable, and therefore much prepared for, has a very good chance of eventually being fought.
Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.
I don’t tell the truth any more to those who can’t make use of it. I tell it mostly to myself, because it always changes me.
Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry.
Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.
It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar.
I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.
All of my creation is an effort to weave a web of connection with the world: I am always weaving it because it was once broken.
The dangerous time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater and greater poverty in intimacy and human vision.
I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.
The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned.
The value of the personal relationship to all things is that it creates intimacy and intimacy creates understanding and understanding creates love.
Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.