Argument does not teach children or the immature. Only time and experience does that.

For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.

Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.

There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.

Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick; it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.

It isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying.

There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.