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

There is as much vanity in self-scourgings as in self-justification.

I am never happier than when I am alone in a foreign city; it is as if I had become invisible.

What I do not know and cannot even hope to understand before I die is why human beings are willfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to each other ... What nerve has atrophied in the torturer, or worse is sensually moved?

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

The critic's hankering to be law-giver rather than servant of literature is irrepressible.

The least stupid question a man asks in his lifetime is not: Is there a God and is He a god or a devil? But: Brother, why are you killing me?