If each one of us could make just one other happy, the whole world would know happiness.

Madame....gloatingly savored her words as earlier she had savored her pig's trotter.

Trotsky rises to give me his hand, then sits at his desk, gently allowing his regard to light on my person.

I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.

One of them, for example, which will probably haunt me more than any other is the problem of communication.

The fact that we are I don't know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world

A novelist is a man who doesn't like his mother.