Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.

I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.

The whole Mediterranean, the sculpture, the palm, the gold beads, the bearded heroes, the wine, the ideas, the ships, the moonlight, the winged gorgons, the bronze men, the philosophers - all of it seems to rise in the sour, pungent taste of these black olives between the teeth. A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.

The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you.

Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.