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

There is only one world; the world pressing against you at this minute. There is only one minute in which you are alive; this minute here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.

Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.

In France, even heresy rapidly hardens into dogma.

... the truth is exactly that which can't be got into words. We are forced to lie, a little or, if we are inferior, much.

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.

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