One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters.

...it is not what one has experienced but what one does with what one has experienced that matters.

Knowledge is an affair of symbols and is, all too often, a hindrance to wisdom, the uncovering of the self from moment to moment

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.

The critics don't interest me because they're concerned with what's past and done, while I'm concerned with what comes next.

I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.