The strangest thing about life is not its frightful cruelty, but that it can be gentle.

Novelists who treat violence and cruelty as something to be exploited for their effect, or to enjoy the pleasure of an evacuation, are carriers of a singularly unpleasant disease.

to grow old is to have taken away, one by one, all gifts of life, the food and wine, the music and the company. ... the gods unloose, one by one, the mortal fingers that cling to the edge of the table.

Women will always put persons above ideas ... and so they'll always be defeated. Persons die, and ideas rule the world.

Nothing lasts. Not even a great sorrow.

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

To reject censorship after studying the risks involved is very well. To reject it ex cathedra, in the tones of Calvin pronouncing a dogma, eyes and mind closed to the possible consequences, the even marginally possible, is to make things too comfortable for oneself.