~~ Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heart-ache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, we are all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.

~~

With each new crisis, however, he becomes more strongly aware of a change which is no change, but rather an intensification of something hidden deep within. Now when he closes his eyes he can really look at himself. He no longer sees a mask. He sees without seeing, to be exact. At this last portal, through which there is no return, fear besets us. To venture farther is to wander alone, to rely wholly upon oneself. The purpose of discipline is to promote freedom. But freedom leads to infinity and infinity is terrifying.

~~

How does one know that one day he will take wing, that like the humming bird he will quiver in mid-air and dazzle with iridescent sheen? One doesn't. One hopes and prays and bashes his head against the wall. But "it" knows. It can bide its time. It knows that all the errors, all the detours, all the failures and frustrations will be turned to account. To be born an eagle one must get accustomed to high places; to be born a writer one must learn to like privation, suffering, humiliation. Above all, one must learn to live apart. I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toe-nails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul.

~~

The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now. A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralyzed by thought.

~~

In any case, the important thing is that in the Rue de Vanves I touched bottom. Like it or not, I was obliged to create a new life for myself. And this new life I feel is mine, absolutely mine, to use or to smash, as I see fit. In this life I am God, and like God I am indifferent to my own fate. I am everything there is-so why worry?

For me the sun had ceased to exist; I had myself become a blazing sun. And like all the other suns in the universe I had to nourish myself from within. I speak in cosmological terms because it seems to me that is the only possible way to think if one is truly alive. I think this way also because it is just the opposite of the way I thought a few years back when I had what is called hopes. Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that you entertain illusions. It's a sort of spiritual clap, I should say. ... For me it is all gravy, one continuous, marvelous stream of time without beginning or end. Yes, the times are bad, permanently bad--unless one becomes immune, becomes God. I make no reservations and no compromises. I accept. I am - and that is all.

~~

As I say, one needs either a heaven or a hell in which to flourish--until one arrives at that Paradise of his own creation, that middle realm which is not a bread-and-butter Utopia of which the masses dream but an interstellar realm in which one rolls along his orbit with sublime indifference. My huge failure [in Paris] was like the recapitulation of the experience of the entire human race: I had to grow foul with knowledge, realize the futility of everything, smash everything, grow desperate, then humble, then sponge myself off the slate, as it were, in order to recover my authenticity. I had to arrive at the brink and then take a leap in the dark.

~~

To the man who is pure at heart I believe that everything is as clear as a bell, even the most esoteric scripts. For such a man there is always mystery, but the mystery is not mysterious, it is logical, natural, ordained, and implicitly agreed. Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living blissfully with it, in it, through it and by it. One gets nearer to the heart of truth, which I suppose is the ultimate aim of the writer, in the measure that he ceases to struggle, in the measure that he abandons his will.