So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.

They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

I had very good dentures once. Some magnificent gold work. It's the only form of jewelry a man can wear that women fully appreciate.

A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority.

You must promise me. You can't desire the end without desiring the means.' Ah, but one can, he thought, one can: one can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns.