Words that come from the heart are never spoken, they get caught in the throat and can only be read in ones's eyes.

There is nothing healthier for a man than to walk on his own two legs.

I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.

It takes little or nothing to undo reputations, the merest trifle makes and remakes them, it is simply a question of finding the best means of engaging the confidence or interest of those who are to become one's unsuspecting echoes or accomplices.

You know the name you were given, you do not know the name that you have

Though I had come into the world on 16 November 1922, my official documents show that I was born two days later, on the 18th. It was thanks to this petty fraud that my family escaped from paying the fine for not having registered my birth at the proper legal time.

Such is our need to shower blame on some distant entity when it is we who lack the courage to face up to what is there before us.