To me, all the juice of a book is in an unpublished manuscript, and the published book is like a dead tree - just good for cutting up and building your house with.

About myself - no. I'm unimportant, an observer, a wandering animal.

Women have been brought up much like slaves, that is, to lie.

The French are a tremendously verbal race: they kill you with their assurances, their repetitions, their reasons, their platitudes, their formulae, their propositions, their solutions.

Behind the concept of woman's strangeness is the idea that a woman may do anything: she is below society, not bound by its law, unpredictable; an attribute given to every member of the league of the unfortunate.

When people are collecting gold they aren't doing business. ... Gold is constipation: even bankruptcy is more fluid. Gold isn't wealth: positions in markets are wealth.

All middle-class novels are about the trials of three, all upper-class novels about mass fornication, all revolutionary novels about a bad man turned good by a tractor.