Every time I start on a new book, I am a beginner again. I doubt myself, I grow discouraged, all the work accomplished in the past is as though it never was, my first drafts are so shapeless that it seems impossible to go on with the attempt at all, right up until the moment - always imperceptible, there, too, there is a break - when it is has become impossible not to finish it.

Living by proxy is always a precarious expedient.

The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.

I think that where you go wrong is that you imagine that your reasons for living ought to fall on you, ready-made from heaven, whereas we have to find them for ourselves.

That a whole part of the middle class detests me... is utterly normal. I would be troubled if the contrary were true.

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.

Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence.