There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another.

The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy.

Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.

The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.

Don't let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.

I write emotional algebra.

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.

My ideas usually come not at the desk writing but in the midst of living.

I had the feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from man's and for which man's language was inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented.

Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.

I believe the lasting revolution comes from deep changes in ourselves which influence our collective lives.

I write like a medium. I fear criticism because I fear it will destroy my spontaneity. I fear restriction. I live by impulse and improvisation and want to write the same way.