Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.

Like the characters in Chekhov, they have no reserves -– you learn the most intimate secrets. You get an impression of a world peopled by eccentrics, of odd professions, almost incredible stupidities, and, to balance them, amazing endurances.

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.

He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.

Pain is easy to write. In pain we're all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?

God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed - that is the meaning of evolution.

We mustn't complain too much of being comedians - it's an honorable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed - that's all. We are bad comedians, we aren't bad men.