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

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

Because the world to-day is so constructed that no one can do what he would like to do, and he is forced, instead, to do what others wish him to do. Because the question of money always intrudes—into what we do, into what we are, into what we wish to become, into our work, into our highest aspirations, even into our relations with the people we love!

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

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

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.

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