Genius is immediate, but talent takes time.

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.

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.

[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.

I'm fond of anything that comes from the sea, and that includes sailors.

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