My prescription for writer’s block is to face the fact that there is no such thing. It’s an invented condition, a literary version of the judicial “abuse excuse.” Writing well is difficult, but one can always write something . And then, with a lot of work, make it better. It’s a question of having enough will and ambition, not of hoping to evade this mysterious hysteria people are always talking about.

Never had he lost himself in a book as one does when that single work seems the most important in the world; unique, a little, all-embracing universe, into which one plunges and submerges oneself in order to draw nourishment out of every syllable.

One believes in the coming of war if one does not sufficiently abhor it.

One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.

One ought to go to a funeral instead of to church when one feels the need of being uplifted. People have on good black clothes, and they take off their hats and look at the coffin, and behave serious and reverent, and nobody dares to make, a bad joke.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

Some of necessity go astray, because for them there is no such thing as a right path.

Sometimes the best helping hand you can get is a good, firm push.

Speech is civilisation itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact—it is silence which isolates.

The beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.