If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the U. S. A., I would certainly choose the Soviet Union.
A writer doesn’t write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same, to make them comfortable.
Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven’t even got a self to express.
Cruel men cry easily at the cinema.
Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It’s only the middle class who demand to pray in suitable surroundings.
Politics, war, marriage, crime, adultery. Everything that exists in the world has something to do with money.
The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?
He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.
One has no talent. I have no talent. It’s just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.
I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.
If I stopped loving Him, I would cease to believe in His love. If I loved God, then I would believe in His love for me. It’s not enough to need it. We have to love first, and I don’t know how. But I need it, how I need it.
You cannot control what you love – you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead.
With Your great schemes, You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse’s nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.
The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.
It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.
Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel; sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.
In the taxi I let my hand lie on her leg like a promise, but I had no intention of keeping my promise.
In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.
I couldn’t help wondering, is my husband so unattractive that no woman has ever wanted him? Except me, of course. I must have wanted him, in a way, once, but I’ve forgotten why, and I was too young to know what I was choosing.
And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.