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

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.

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.

There are connoisseurs of blue just as there are connoisseurs of wine.

Our reality defines itself by people who strive for change

Leadership is influence. An influencer is not automatically a leader.

I learned always to trust my own deep sense of what I should do, and not just obediently trust the judgment of others - even others better than I am.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

If you have written something that the film people want, like a book, it does give you a way in.

Sometimes it's better to put love into hugs than to put it into words. Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.

The love of country is more powerful than reason itself.

An author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again.

If men were basically evil, who would bother to improve the world instead of giving it up as a bad job at the outset?

The 'path' comes into existence only when we observe it.