I was always ready to sacrifice purity of form to the exigencies of fantastic content, causing form to bulge and burst like a sponge-bag containing a small furious devil

The day before, after months of soliciting and cursing, the emetic of a bribe had been administered to the right rat at the right office

A limpid dawn had completely unsheathed one side of the empty street.

I look back upon my almost couvade-like concern with our baby

fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man’s mind had been born

there is in every child the essentially human urge to reshape the earth, to act upon a friable environment (unless he is a born Marxist or a corpse and meekly waits for the environment to fashion him)

As time went on and the shadow of fool-made history vitiated even the exactitude of sundials, we moved more restlessly over Europe