It is what we are forced to do that forms our character, not what we do of our own free will.

I like to compare my method with that of painters centuries ago, proceeding from layer to layer.

Yes, one uses what one knows, but autobiography means something else. I should never be able to write a real autobiography; I always end by falsifying and fictionalizing—I’m a liar, in fact. That means I’m a novelist, after all. I write about what I know.

An uncertain evil causes anxiety because, at the bottom of one's heart, one goes on hoping till the last moment that it may not be true; a certain evil, on the other hand, instills, for a time, a kind of dreary tranquillity.

Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.

...my boredom might be described as a malady affecting external objects and consisting of a withering process; an almost instantaneous loss of vitality--just as though one saw a flower change in a few seconds from a bud to decay and dust.

This thought strengthened in me my belief that all men, without exception, deserve to be pitied, if only because they are alive.