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

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.

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

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

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

The older women were Sunbeams and I guess we were Cherubs or Lambs, but our mothers were Nightingales.

The German passion for bureaucracy -- for written and signal forms . . . to move about, to work, to exist -- is like a steel pin pinning each French individual to a sheet of paper, the way an entomologist pins each specimen insect . . .