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.

The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read and write.

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

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

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.

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.