If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don't have to throw the past away.

One can't measure how a mood of confidence comes about.

The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand.

Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.

From Ernest Hemingway's stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.

Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.

Can you imagine writers influencing things in America? Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more - absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.