People come to Paris, to the capital, to give their lives a sense of belonging, of an almost mythical participation in society.
It’s only women who are not really quite women at all, frivolous women who have no idea, who neglect repairs.
There are many women who write as they think they should write – to imitate men and make a place for themselves in literature.
I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.
Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It’s absolutely unavoidable.
One must talk. That’s how it is. One must.
No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.
I acquired that drinker’s face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me.
To love one child and to love all children, whether living or dead -somewhere these two loves come together. To love a no-good but humble punk and to love an honest man who believes himself to be an honest man -somewhere these, too, come together.
I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which I’ve never spoken. It’s always there, in the same silence, amazing. It’s the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight.
War is a generality, so are the inevitabilities of war, including death.
She says people ought to learn to live like them, with the body abandoned in a wilderness, and in the mind the memory of a single kiss, a single word, a single look to stand for a whole love.
In a thousand years time this day will have existed for a thousand years to the day. And the ignorance of the whole world about what they’ve said today will have a date too.
What she said was always strange. It had happened long ago. It seemed insignificant. And yet it was something you remembered forever. The words as well as the story. The voice as much as the words.
Some people are like that – closed – they can’t learn from anyone. Us, for example, we can’t learn anything, neither I from you nor you from me, nor from anyone, nor from anything, nor from what happens.
I’ve forgotten the words with which to tell you. I knew them once, but I’ve forgotten them, and now I’m talking to you without them.
I have never waited for anything the way I’ve waited for today, when nothing will happen.
And then, one day, my love, you come out of eternity.
I feel a sadness I expected and which comes only from myself. I say I’ve always been sad. That I can see the same sadness in photos of myself when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I’ve always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it’s so like me.
You give me a great desire to love.