Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
Caress the detail, the divine detail.
Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
There is only one school of literature - that of talent.
Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.
That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.
The world is always in movement.
I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
The longer I live the more convinced I become that one of the greatest honors we can confer on other people is to see them as they are, to recognize not only that they exist, but that they exist in specific ways and have specific realities.
An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.
One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
