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

The stench of human wreckage in which the Nazi regime finally sank down to defeat has been the most shocking fact of modern times.

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

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.

[On World War II:] The war, which destroyed so much of everything, was also constructive, in a way. It established clearly the cold, and finally unhypocritical fact that the most important thing on earth to men today is money.

Never have nights been more beautiful than these nights of anxiety. In the sky have been shining in trinity the moon, Venus and Mars. Nature has been more splendid than man.

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.