The secret of being happy consists of knowing how to enjoy yourself -- enjoy being at table, in bed, enjoy standing up, sitting down, enjoy the nearest ray of sunshine, the slightest bit of landscape: in other words, love everything. Thus it follows that to be happy you must already be so -- there's no bread without leavening.

When you write, you feel how it must be, you know that at such a spot a certain thing is needed, at another spot something else; you compose pictures for yourself that you see, you have rather the feeling that you are going to bring something to flower; you feel it in your heart like the distant echo of all the passions you are going to create; and the inability to render all that is the eternal despair of those who write; the poverty of languages, which have scarcely one word for a hundred thoughts; the weakness of man, who cannot find approximations -- and to me it is an eternal anguish.

Oh my God, my God, why did you cause me to be born with so much ambition? [...]

You must let characters limn themselves according to their own logic; action must develop of itself.