I must warn you that the books I like are not necessarily the ones I think are the best. I like them for various reasons not always easy to explain.

This was his world, he said to himself, the sad, oppressive world that God had provided for him, and he was responsible to it.

Dr Urbino did not agree: in his opinion a Liberal president was exactly the same as a Conservative president, but not as well dressed.

If God hadn't rested on Sunday, He would have had time to finish the world.

You can't eat hope,' the woman said. You can't eat it, but it sustains you,' the colonel replied.

I have never done anything except write, but I don't possess the vocation or talents of a narrator, have no knowledge at all of the laws of dramatic composition, and if I have embarked upon this enterprise it is because I trust in the light shed by how much I have read in my life.

It was as if they had leapt over the arduous cavalry of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.