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

jealousy, the most hideous emotion any human being ever suffers, has nothing to do with the mind. Or not at first.

In my firm, we dealt in lies. Advertising is that ... the skilful use of the truth to mislead, to spoil, to debase.

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.

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

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

... we do not remember people as they were. What we remember is the effect they had on us then, but we remember it through an emotion charged with all that has since happened to us.