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

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.

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.

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

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.

...my boredom might be described as a malady affecting external objects and consisting of a withering process; an almost instantaneous loss of vitality--just as though one saw a flower change in a few seconds from a bud to decay and dust.