...then he stretched himself alongside her to smoke a cigarette with all the ceremony of an opium dreamer.

The women cannot go out except to go to church or to the bullfight, and even that is unusual. I consider it a very ugly custom, and if I couldn't go out as I wished, I would leave this country [Spain], if only because of that one custom of the inhabitants.

By beginning a diary, I was already conceding that life would be more bearable if I looked at it as an adventure and a tale. I was telling myself the story of a life, and this transmutes into an adventure the things which can shatter you.

The diary taught me that it is in the moments of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most accurately. I learned to choose the heightened moments because they are the moments of revelation.

The period without the diary remains an ordeal. Every evening I want my diary as one wants opium.

Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing.

My diary seems to keep me whole.