Man's greatest drive is not love or hate but to change another person's writing.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.

His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every movement, every sound, every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, an agony. Even in sleep he could not altogether escape form her image.

You're only a rebel from the waist downwards,' he told her.

The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.

Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?