Well,’ I said, ‘Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn’t what you feel in New York — ’He was smiling. I stopped. ‘What do you feel in New York?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps you feel,’ I told him, ‘all the time to come. There’s such power there, everything is in such movement. You can’t help wondering—I can’t help wondering—what it will all be like— many years from now.

European society has always been divided into classes in a way that American society never has been. A European writer considers himself to be part of an old and honorable tradition--of intellectual activity, of letters--and his choice of a vocation does not cause him any uneasy wonder as to whether or not it will cost him all his friends. But this tradition does not exist in America.

I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.

All racists are irresponsible.

Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.