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.

You can't think on purpose about somebody or something. Either you think about them naturally or you don't think at all.

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.

The less one notices happiness, the greater it is.

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.

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.