I measured love by the extent of my jealousy.
Thought’s a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?
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.
Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil – or else an absolute ignorance.
For an artist to think in terms of success is like a priest trying to think in terms of success.
Innocence is a kind of insanity.
Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector.
There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn’t shared.
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.
Pain is easy to write. In pain we’re all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?
I’m tired and I’m sick to death of being without you.
Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.
Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years.
Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.
In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
When we are not sure, we are alive.
Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.
I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.
Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.
I had never known her before and I had never loved her so much. The more we know the more we love, I thought.