The older I grow the more sharply I mistrust words. So few of them have any meaning left. It is impossible to write one sentence in which every word has the bareness and hardness of bones, the reality of the skeleton.

Is it really beyond our wits to devise some form of censorship which would trap only the crudely sadistic?

If the novel is dying, I see no chance that dismembering it will revive it.

Nationalism will keep its venom until we succeed in creating an image of the nations of the whole world as so many provinces.

The impossible talked of is less impossible from the moment words are laid to it.

In France, even heresy rapidly hardens into dogma.

The young are so much more vulnerable than the old - the stuff is still warm and malleable, it takes impressions.