It is essential to persuade the soldier that those he is being urged to massacre are bandits who do not deserve to live; before killing other good, decent fellows like himself, his gun would fall from his hands.

Chastity more rarely follows fear, or a resolution, or a vow, than it is the mere effect of lack of appetite and, sometimes even, of distaste.

I would like the events never to be told directly by the author, but rather to be introduced (and several times, from various angles) by those among the characters on whom they will have had any effect. I would like those events, in the account they will make of them, to appear slightly distorted; a kind of interest stems, for the reader, from the simple fact that he should need to restore. The story requires his collaboration in order to properly take shape.

It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves - in finding themselves.

Money cannot buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you're being miserable. Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.

Too chaste an adolescence makes for a dissolute old age. It is doubtless easier to give up something one has known than something one imagines.

The reasons that drive me to write are many and the most important are the most secret, I think. Perhaps most of all this: to put something out of death's reach.