I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the possibility of love dying.

My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.

The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?

A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.

Yesterday I went home with him and we did the usual things. I haven't the nerve to put them down, but I'd like to, because now when I'm writing it's already tomorrow and I'm afraid of getting to the end of yesterday. As long as I go on writing, yesterday is today and we are still together

You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.

If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the U. S. A. , I would certainly choose the Soviet Union.