In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.

A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious retreat of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.

We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility.

Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate; a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.

If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in his rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last.

It is the fear of middle-age in the young, of old-age in the middle-aged, which is the prime cause of infidelity, that infallible rejuvenator.