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.

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

War has become an affair of machines...and soldiers are little more than clever mechanics.

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

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

In life there are no problems, that is, objective and external choices; there is only the life which we do not resolve as a problem but which we live as an experience, whatever the final result may be.

Dictatorships are one-way streets. Democracy boasts two-way traffic.