The more you learn, the less you fear. "Learn" not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.

The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.

we must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death

I'm one of those writers who started off writing novels and came to writing short stories later, partly because I didn't have the right ideas, partly because I think that short stories are more difficult. I think learning to write short stories also made me attracted toward a paring down of the novel form.

As I've explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page of the papers.

Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.