[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.

Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.

The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.

loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.

...people don't respect the morning. An alarm clock violently wakes them up, shatters their sleep like the blow of an ax, and they immediately surrender themselves to deadly haste.

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.

In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.