Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

It is not enough merely to win; others must lose.

In matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed.

Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.

France is a nation devoted to the false hypothesis on which it then builds marvelously logical structures.

If you want to rise in politics in the United States, there is one subject you must stay away from, and that is politics.

What is there to say, finally, except that pain is bad and pleasure good, life all, death nothing.