As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved - it's the citizen who changes things.

The best way to killing a rose is to force it open when it is still only the promise of a bud.

When I am occupied with a work that requires continuity - a novel, for example - I write every day.

Don't be afraid, the darkness you're in is no greater than the darkness inside your own body, they are two darknesses separated by a skin, I bet you've never thought of that, you carry a darkness about with you all the time and that doesn't frighten you...my dear chap, you have to learn to live with the darkness outside just as you learned to live with the darkness inside

Unlike Joseph her husband, Mary is neither upright nor pious, but she is not blame for this, the blame lies with the language she speaks if not with the men who invented it, because that language has no feminine form for the words upright and pious.

Every novel is like this, desperation, a frustrated attempt to save something of the past. Except that it still has not been established whether it is the novel that prevents man from forgetting himself or the impossibility of forgetfulness that makes him write novels.

Just as the habit does not make the monk, the sceptre does not make the king.