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.

A writer survives in spite of his beliefs.

The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.

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

Every true writer is like a bird; he repeats the same song, the same theme, all his life. For me, this theme as always been revolt.

When I sit at my table to write, I never know what it's going to be until I'm under way. I trust in inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn't. But I don't sit back waiting for it. I work every day.

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.