Writing was a chimney for my blazing ambitions.

Lord, if there is a heartache Vienna cannot cure I hope never to feel it. I came home cured of everything except Vienna.

Think of all the really successful men and women you know. Do you know a single one who didn't learn very young the trick of calling attention to himself in the right quarters?

Pornography is essentially reductive, an exercise in the nothing-but mode, a depersonalizing of the human beings involved, a showing-up of human lust as nothing but an affair of the genitals.

Writing was a chimney for my blazing ambitions.

In France, even heresy rapidly hardens into dogma.

I am never happier than when I am alone in a foreign city; it is as if I had become invisible.