There is only one world the world pressing against you this minute.

Language is memory and metaphor.

The gesture with which one generation guards the next is the movement, and the only time we see it clearly, of life itself.

You can't argue with a raging want. You can, but it is useless.

... I used words without precautions. I wanted to disappear into them, I fled into the bovaryism of the writer trying to create an effect.

The writer - more especially the novelist - who has not, at one moment or another, considered his publisher unworthy of him, has still to be conceived.

There is a stage in any misery when the victim begins to find a deep satisfaction in it.