Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.

Yet friendship, I believe, is essential to intellectuals. It is probably the growth hormone the mind requires as it begins its activity of producing and exchanging ideas. You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk. In the course of my history, not love or marriage so much as friendship has promoted growth.

It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with its herds of hippies, originality has become a sort of fringe benefit, a mere convention, accepted obsolescence, the Beatnik model being turned in for the Hippie model, as though strangely obedient to capitalist laws of marketing.

The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.

love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.

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.

Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes.