Man is apt to be more moved by the art of his own period, not because it is more perfect, but because it is organically related to him.

We shall kill. If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day... Do not count days; do not count miles. Count only the number of Germans you have killed.

There is nothing more wonderful than freedom of speech.

You could cover the whole earth with asphalt, but sooner or later green grass would break through.

It’s as much a writer’s concern, who is responsible to his readers for all the books written before him as well as those which will be written after him.

It seems to me that the novel is very much alive as a form. Without any question, every epoch has its own forms, and the novel nowadays cannot resemble that of the nineteenth century. In this domain all experiments are justified, and it is better to write something new clumsily than to repeat the old brilliantly. In the nineteenth century, novels dealt with the fate of a person or of a family; this was linked to life in that period. In our time the destinies of people are interwoven. Whether man recognizes it or not, his fate is much more linked to that of many other people than it used to be.

People seldom learn from the mistakes of others-not because they deny the value of the past, but because they are faced with new problems.