Nothing lasts. Not even a great sorrow.

Any marriage worth the name is no better than a series of beginnings - many of them abortive.

What I do not know and cannot even hope to understand before I die is why human beings are willfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to each other ... What nerve has atrophied in the torturer, or worse is sensually moved?

Critics have been amusing themselves for a long time by auscultating fiction for signs of heart failure.

I do not think about absent persons as often or with such intense longing as I think of places. They lie one below the other in my mind.

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.

invaders always destroy libraries.