You've only got to begin to do anything to find out how few honest, honourable people there are. Sometimes, when I can't sleep, I think: "Oh Lord, you've given us huge forests, infinite fields, and endless horizons, and we, living here, ought really to be giants.

Is it our job to judge? The gendarme, policemen and bureaucrats have been especially prepared by fate for that job. Our job is towrite, and only to write.

I've noticed that people who get married cease to be curious.

You only have to start a job of work to realize how few decent, honest folk there are about.

Once a man gets a fixed idea, there's nothing to be done.

Love is a great thing. It is not by chance that in all times and practically among all cultured peoples love in the general senseand the love of a man for his wife are both called love. If love is often cruel or destructive, the reasons lie not in love itself, but in the inequality between people.

If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.