Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding.

So much of a novelist's writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them.

Ordinary life goes on--that has saved many a man's reason.

You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?.

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.

Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.

Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.