There are only a few bits of absolute knowledge in the world, people can learn only one or two fundamental facts about each other, the rest is decoration and prejudice.

. . . all that she had had, and all that she had missed, were lost together, and were twice lost in this landslide of remembered losses.

I specialize in what the French call la petite histoire. I am interested in the individual thumbprint.

I will never again attempt to tell any young person what to do - the really gifted don't need advice and the others can't take it.

You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.

The greatest art comes out of warmth and conviction and deep feeling, but then, very few people, even geniuses, have all that.

We are born knowing death.