The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life.

Self-pity comes so naturally to all of us. The most solid happiness can be shaken by the compassion of a fool.

Memory is a great artist. For every man and for every woman it makes the recollection of his or her life a work of art and an unfaithful record.

A marriage without conflicts is almost as inconceivable as a nation without crises.

The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one's encounter with it in a book.

Men fear silence as they fear solitude, because both give them a glimpse of the terror of life's nothingness.

The need to express one's self in writing springs from a maladjustment of life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action.