A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to take it off of you.

Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.

Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.

Art must take reality by surprise.

It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the “fronts” people assume before one another’s eyes, and the “front” a writer puts on the face of reality.

Every little girl knows about love. It is only her capacity to suffer because of it that increases.

After Proust, there are certain things that simply cannot be done again. He marks off for you the boundaries of your talent.

To jealousy, nothing is more frightful than laughter.

The one thing I regret is that I will never have time to read all the books I want to read.

One can never speak enough of the virtues, the dangers, the power of shared laughter.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to take it off of you.