The detective story itself is in a dilemma. It is a vein which is in danger of being worked out, the demand is constant, the powers of supply variable, and the reader, with each one he absorbs, grows a little more sophisticated and harder to please, while the novelist, after each one he writes, becomes a little more exhausted.

Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.

Doing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so.

There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.

It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.

Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.