We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

Doing nothing, badly.

I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else an absolute ignorance.

It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.

One forgets so quickly one's own youth.

With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed-he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Dog.