I get a warm feeling among my books.
Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.
My brother is a strange fellow,” said Bernard, speaking with terrible bonhomie.
If certain individuals fall in love from motives of convenience, they can be contrasted with plenty of others in whom passion seems principally aroused by the intensity of administrative difficulties in procuring its satisfaction.
Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.
Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.
The whole idea of interviews is in itself absurd – one cannot answer deep questions about what one’s life was like – one writes novels about it.
It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.
I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.
When people really hate one another, the tension within them can sometimes make itself felt throughout a room, like atmospheric waves, first hot, then cold, wafted backwards and forwards as if in an invisible process of air conditioning, creating a pervasive physical disturbance.
One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be.
Books do furnish a room.
Writing is above all a question of instinct.