...it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.

The number of one's possible fantasies is inversely proportional to the amount of one's liquid assets. For him who has everything dreams are no longer possible.

A writer should not run around with a mirror for his countrymen; he should tell his society and his times things no one ever thought before.

So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox.

Good books tell the truth, even when they're about things that never have been and never will be. They're truthful in a different way

The only writers who have any peace are the ones who don't write. And there are some like that. They wallow in a sea of possibilities. To express a thought, you first have to limit it, and that means kill it. Every word I speak robs me of a thousand others, and every line I write means giving up another.

I never loved totalitarianism and all the ideas of making mankind happy always seemed crazy to me.