Women have invented nothing in all that, except the men who were born as male babies and grew up to be men big enough to be killed fighting.

She had storms all her life, but she died peacefully.

Genius is a talent only for living, those who possess it have little gift for dying.

... people who don't want something are less likely to get it than people who do want something.

Proust has been dead since 1922, yet the annual appearance of his posthumous works has left him, to the reader, alive. Now there is nothing left to publish. Five years after his interment, Proust seems dead for the first time.

When I hear a writer say that they ‘put in a call,’ I want to pull my hair out.

[Charles de Gaulle] has been abysmally careless, like a man running a bus over mountains, who forgot to equip it with good brakes.