As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.

A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.

I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day - and the sitting down is all.

Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.

What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history.

You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.

He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is detestable. And it has a fascination, too, which goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination--you know.