If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

The traveller's-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know, one must be an actor as well as a spectator.

Man is an amphibian who lives simultaneously in two worlds-the given and the home-made, the world of matter, life and consciousness and the world of symbols.

If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats.

In life, man proposes, God disposes.

Liberties are not given, they are taken.