To jealousy, nothing is more frightful than laughter.
Love lasts about seven years. That's how long it takes for the cells of the body to totally replace themselves.
I have loved to the point of madness; that which is called madness, that which to me, is the only sensible way to love.
Only by pursuing the extremes in one's nature, with all its contradictions, appetites, aversions, rages, can one hope to understand a little ... oh, I admit only a very little ... of what life is about.
I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.
Marriage? It's like asparagus eaten with vinaigrette or hollandaise, a matter of taste but of no importance.
It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the 'fronts' people assume before one another's eyes, and the 'front' a writer puts on the face of reality.
Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.
Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.
After Proust, there are certain things that simply cannot be done again. He marks off for you the boundaries of your talent.
I've read Proust and Stendhal. That keeps you in your place.
I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.
Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.
Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.
I had a strong desire to write and some free time.
