When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.

There are two kinds of brave men: those who are brave by the grace of nature, and those who are brave by an act of will.

Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.

You do not really wish to hear more of the Battle of Kadesh. Let me say only that human fat, gorged in considerable quantity, has an intoxicating effect. I became ... drunk.

The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.

The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.

The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again; it has perhaps not been here so intensely in thirty years, not since the Nazis were prospering, but it is coming back.