I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.
The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.
I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.
It is impossible that a town will not play a part in your life, it does not even make much difference whether you have more good or bad things to say of it, it draws your mind to it, by a mental law of gravitation.
No domestic animal can be as still as a wild animal. The civilized people have lost the aptitude of stillness, and must take lessons in silence from the wild before they are accepted by it.
The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquillity. I was a painter before I was a writer and a painter never wants the subject right under his nose; he wants to stand back and study a landscape with half-closed eyes.
In those days I had various strong inclinations, for wine, gambling and cockfighting, and the society of gypsies, together with a passion for theological discussion which I had inherited from my father himself-all of which my father thought I had better rid myself of before I married.
I felt that Paris was illuminated by a splendor possessed by no other places.
It is a good thing to be a great sinner. Or should human beings allow Christ to have died on the Cross for the sake of our petty lies and our paltry whorings.
The lime trees were in bloom. But in the early morning only a faint fragrance drifted through the garden, an airy message, an aromatic echo of the dreams during the short summer night.
There are things which cannot be carried through even with the good will of everybody concerned.
When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find out that it is the same in all her music.
Man reaches the highest point of lovableness at 12 to 17 – to get it back, in a second flowering, at the age of 70 to 90.
I don’t believe in evil; I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.
There is a particular hapiness in giving a man whom you like very much, good food that you have cooked yourself.
Here I am, where I am supposed to be.
But by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all for fate to get rid of.
Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence.
It is more than their land that you take away from the people, whose native land you take. It is their past as well, their roots and their identity. If you take away the things that they have been used to see and will be expecting to see, you may, in a way, as well take their eyes.
There are many ways to the recognition of truth, and Burgundy is one of them.
Who tells a finer tale than any of us. Silence does.