Nobody knows what I am trying to do but I do and I know when I succeed.
I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Readers, are an afterthought.
In a war everybody always knows all about Switzerland, in peace times it is just Switzerland but in war time it is the only country that everybody has confidence in, everybody.
Just as everybody has the vote including women, I think children should, because as a child is conscious of itself then it has to me an existence and has a stake in what happens.
There is a difference between twenty-nine and thirty. When you are twenty-nine it can be the beginning of everything. When you are thirty it can be the end of everything.
A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.
War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.
There is no real reality to a really imagined life any more.
There isn’t any answer. There isn’t going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.
It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death.
It is natural not to care about a sister certainly not when she is four years older and grinds her teeth at night.
It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for the future, none at all. It certainly is extraordinary, but it is certainly true.
I know what Germans are. They are a funny people. They are always choosing someone to lead them in a direction which they do not want to go.
That is what war is and dancing it is forward and back, when one is out walking one wants not to go back the way they came but in dancing and in war it is forward and back.
The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn’t make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.
Human beings are interested in two things. They are interested in the Reality and interested in telling about it.
The unreal is natural, so natural that it makes of unreality the most natural of anything natural. That is what America does, and that is what America is.
The nineteenth century was completely lacking in logic, it had cosmic terms and hopes, and aspirations, and discoveries, and ideals but it had no logic.
A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.
The reason why all of us naturally began to live in France is because France has scientific methods, machines and electricity, but does not really believe that these things have anything to do with the real business of living.