Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.
A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.
The truth has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.
In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.
No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.
Writing is a form of therapy sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?
Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.
We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.
Failure too is a form of death.
People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery.
Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.