No one asks public men to be strictly moral, but they must seem to be well-behaved.

Sadistic literature is not only inhumane. It is anti-human.

Very rare, the intelligence of the heart. The intelligence of the whimsical brain is less rare, less attaching, sometimes tedious.

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.

The gesture with which one generation guards the next is the movement, and the only time we see it clearly, of life itself.

Nothing lasts. Not even a great sorrow.

Language is one of the thin walls humanity has built up over centuries against its own bestial and destructive impulses.