“I want to be your south wind—bringing good and fruitful things only.”

more info

“Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.”

more info

“The white page for me is like a ski slope; I go absolutely mad! I go mad in stationery stores. Just to see beautiful paper gives me a desire to write.”

more info

“I think we do need to carry the blueprint, the image of something we want. I don’t mean the impossible, the absolute thing, the romantic thing, the neurotic thing, the narcissistic thing like trying to find the twin who says ‘yes’ to everything. I mean once you are ready to accept the reality of human beings, then I think you do need to have a blueprint. I say the dream serves to guide us towards what we want. We do have to have a wish—I don’t mean that kind of impossible hope—but we do have to have some image of what we want to go towards, because that guides us.”

more info

“At the right there was an old House—the window was open. We could see a table with a greenish oil cloth, on it a long bread, a bottle of wine, heavy white plates. We could only see the old hands of the people who were eating. A hand passed a basket with 2 peaches on it. It was all the paintings of the world, quiet, resisting time, everlasting. It is the only image of duration and eternity I have seen in a long time.”

more info

“There is a way of living which makes for greater airiness, space, ease, freedom. It is like an airplane’s rise above the storms. It is a way of looking at obstacles as something to overcome; of looking at what defeats us as a monster created by ourselves, within ourselves, by our fears, and therefore dissolvable and transformable.”

more info

“Introspection does not need to be a still life. It can be an active alchemy.”

more info

“It was only when I wrote my first book that the world I wanted to live in opened to me.”

more info

“Work: work doesn’t solve everything but when a person is practicing the work that he loves, you can always tell; there is a rhythm in their absorption which shows in the eyes; their eyes glitter with sights brought back from private places: when the right words come together the world becomes at that moment mathematically perfect: so with each stitch of the cobbler’s machine, the tailor’s needle. They are seeing unity, peace, in some tiny fragment of the world and they know that this fragment is themselves.”

more info

“I put my faith in therapy as others do in religion, or philosophy.”

more info

“When you allow yourself to be negative, you add to the burdens of the world.”

more info

“Books are the greatest companions, confessors, confidantes, tutors, a source of pleasure, a cure for loneliness, and to find one, in the middle of an island in Tahiti, in the heart of the Moroccan desert, or at an airport where one is stranded for a night, is to find the friend who reminds us we are not alone.”

more info

“She refused to sleep in the same bed with a dead love, the skeleton of a passion.”

more info

“…in New York at the end of the day I play ostrich. I take a glass of beer or wine or a pill and go to sleep to have energy for the next day.”

more info

“The abstract beauty of Japanese art issues from the abstract beauty of their lives. They do not like clutter. They like to look at one flower at a time, one painting, one pot. They have a storage house for the objects of art which are not being displayed.”

more info