A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.

That's what I consider true generosity. You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.

Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.

The arrogance of some Christians would close heaven to them if, to their misfortune, it existed.

I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen.

On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself--on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning.