Life and death have been lacking in my life.

On the floor, and hanging on to the bar, squatted an old man, immobile as an object. His years had reduced and polished him as water does a stone or the generations of men do a sentence.

A writer's work is the product of laziness.

Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.

The great American writer Herman Melville says somewhere in The White Whale that a man ought to be 'a patriot to heaven,' and I believe it is a good thing, this ambition to be a cosmopolitan, this idea to be citizens not of a small parcel of the world that changes according to the currents of politics, according to the wars, to what occurs, but to feel that the whole world is our country.

If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his reader to believe it.

I think most people are more important than their opinions.