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

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.

Our ideals, laws and customs should be based on the proposition that each generation in turn becomes the custodian rather than the absolute owner of our resources - and each generation has the obligation to pass this inheritance on in the future.

I don't think it's possible to write a good novel around a negative personality.

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

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

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