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.

In France, even heresy rapidly hardens into dogma.

A nation has honor precisely as it has fleas - on this or that body. The statesman who talks of honor - unless he means something else, quite different - is a rogue.

The past is able to close round certain moments, as if they were seeds, and deliver them again fresh and living in the present.

From so much of this seriously-intended pornography there rises, even when it is lewdly or boisterously comic, the acrid smell, unmistakable, of self-dislike.

... the stomach is near the heart and one appetite pricks on another.

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