I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

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.

In my religion, there would be no exclusive doctrine; all would be love, poetry, and doubt.

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

Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.

Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.