The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.

But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.

His overriding life necessity was not love, it was his profession…He had come to medicine not by coincidence or calculation but by a deep inner desire. Insofar as it is possible to divide people into categories, the surest criterion is the deep-seated desires that orient them to one or another lifelong activity. Every Frenchman is different. But all the actors the world over are similar.

For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.

The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.

People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end.

Forgive me," he went on. "For a long time I have had the peculiar habit of not arriving but appearing.