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

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

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

Loyalty, Signor Molteni, not love. Penelope is loyal to Ulysses but we do not know how far she loved him...and as you know people can sometimes be absolutely loyal without loving. In certain cases, in fact, loyalty is form of vengeance, of black-mail, of recovering one's self-respect. Loyalty, not love.

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.

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.

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