The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.

He was falling between glacial walls, he didn't know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-coloured walls.

Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.

Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.

A book, a true book, is the writer's confessional. For, whether he would have it so or not, he is betrayed, directly or indirectly, by his characters, into presenting publicly his innermost feelings.

I'm not against sentimentality. I think you need it. I mean, I don't think you get a true picture of people without it in writing... It's a kind of poetry, it's an emotional poetry, and, to bring it back to the literary scene, I don't think anything is true that doesn't have it, that doesn't have poetry in it.

I don't recommend being a bachelor, but it helps if you want to write.