But I lie. I embellish. My words are not deep enough. They disguise, they conceal. I will not rest until I have told of my descent into a sensuality which was as dark, as magnificent, as wild, as my m...
At sixteen, Sabina took moon baths, first of all, because everyone else took sun baths, and second, she admitted, because she had been told it was dangerous.
The discovery of each other brings a kind of peace, because it brings the certitude that we are right. We are stronger together ... we will have less doubts. This seemed deeply true, yet I wonder if i...
When human pain has struck me fiercely, when anger has corroded me, I rise, I always rise after the crucifixion, and I am in terror of my ascensions. THE FISSURE IN REALITY. The divine departure. I fa...
To commit suicide is easy. To live without a god is more difficult. The drunkenness of triumph is greater than the drunkenness of sacrifice.
This morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have...
Things I forgot to tell you:That I love you, and that when I awake in the morning I use my intelligence to discover more ways of appreciating you.That when June comes back she will love you more becau...
The more hunger, the greater the desires, like those of men in prison, wild and haunting. So we had here a perfect world in which to grow the flower of eroticism. Of course, if you get too hungry, too...
She needed a confessor! Would she find it there, in the world of the artists? All over the world they had their meeting places, their affiliations, their rules of membership, their kingdoms, their chi...
Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.
Question: I am interested in so many things, and I have a terrible fear because my mother keeps telling me that I'm just going to be exploring the rest of my life and never get anything done. But I fi...
Perhaps behind our occasional hostility toward the artist and writer there may be a slight tinge of jealousy. The man or woman who for the sake of family life, children, takes up work he does not like...
Nothing seems true today except the death of the goldfish who used to make love at ninety kilometers an hour in the pool. The maid has given him a Christian burial. To the worms! To the worms!
Literature, the ultimate gift for expressing the most subtle aspects of man's thought and feeling, may not survive persecution: first by religion, then by the bourgeoisie, then by Marxism, and now by...
It was as if in captivity, her brilliant plumage were losing its brilliance. She felt the metamorphosis. She knew she was moulting.
Instead of answering her as soon as he saw her hair grow electric, her face more vivid, her eyes like lightning, her body restless and jerky like a racehorse’s, he retired behind this wall of objectiv...
In art, in history man fights his fears, he wants to live forever, he is afraid of death, he wants to work with other men, he wants to live forever. He is like a child afraid of death. The child is af...
I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife. I think highly of faithfulness. But my temperament belongs to the writer, not...
I only feel close to people who arouse my energy, who make enormous demands of me, who are capable of enriching me with experience, pain, people who do not doubt my courage, or my toughness. People wh...
I love your silences, they are like mine. You are the only being before whom I am not distressed by my own silences. You have a vehement silence, one feels it is charged with essences, it is a strange...