It is far easier to write an angry letter than to go and say angry things to another person - because as soon as we look in one another's faces we can see the other point of view.

The real issue is not whether two and two make four or whether two and two make five, but whether life advances by men who love words or by men who love living.

I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider. If I was offered anything like the Nobel Prize for Literature, I'd find it an extremely difficult conflict because I'd be basically disinclined to accept.

The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.

The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.

In the mid nineteenth century, the typical murderer was a drunken illiterate; a hundred years later the typical murderer regards himself as a thinking man.

The mystical impulse in men is somehow a desire to possess the universe. In women, it's a desire to be possessed.