It just happened. As though a moment comes when it's both necessary and natural to make a decision that has long since been made.

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.

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

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy.

For 30 years I have tried to make it understood that there are no criminals.

I have made love to ten thousand women.

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