You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

Everything that a painter did or that a writer wrote was a part of his training and preparation for what he was to do.

In those days, there was no money to buy books.

You see I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across, not just to depict life, or criticize it, but to actually make it alive.

But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there.

Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

Retirement is the ugliest word in the language.