Jealousy is not at all low, but it catches us humbled and bowed down, at first sight.

The day after that wedding night I found that a distance of a thousand miles, abyss and discovery and irremediable metamorphosis, separated me from the day before.

It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.

If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without truffles.

I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering.

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

I love my past, I love my present. I am not ashamed of what I have had, and I am not sad because I no longer have it.

You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.

Never touch a butterfly's wing with your finger.

By an image we hold on to our lost treasures, but it is the wrenching loss that forms the image, composes, binds the bouquet.

A woman who thinks she is intelligent demands the same rights as man. An intelligent woman gives up.

Don't live by my words, don't die by them, chew them slowly digest them, and smile if they give nourishment to your soul.

Time's arrow is the loss of fidelity in compression. A sketch, not a photograph. A memory is a re-creation, precious because it is both more and less than the original.

There’s nothing like a friendly handshake to establish social cooperation, but the bonobo handshake takes erotic politics to a whole new level.

I claim not to have controlled events but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

Marriage is like a game of chess except the board is flowing water, the pieces are made of smoke and no move you make will have any effect on the outcome.

I don't think that the world would be a better place if everyone owned a dog, and I don't think that all relationships between dogs and their owners are good, healthy, or enriching.

Even bad times have good things in them to make you feel alive.

There are few humanities that could surpass in discipline, in beauty, in emotional and aesthetic satisfaction, those humanities which are called mathematics, and the natural sciences.

First of all, you have to understand that I'm like anybody else. When I hear my voice on a record I absolutely loathe my voice. I cannot stand my voice.

When I get angry, I start thinking about the people involved and they don't deserve my time.