I was going to get myself recognized at any price. If I could not win fame by goodness, I was ready to do it by badness.

My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.

Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.

The only form of action open to a child is to break something or strike someone, its mother or another child; it cannot cause things to happen in the world.

Like Michelangelo and Cellini, Florentines of every station are absorbed in acquiring real estate: a little apartment that can be rented to foreigners; a farm that will supply the owner with oil, wine, fruit, and flowers for the house.

Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.

The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero.