In France, even heresy rapidly hardens into dogma.
Novelists who treat violence and cruelty as something to be exploited for their effect, or to enjoy the pleasure of an evacuation, are carriers of a singularly unpleasant disease.
One of the uncovenanted benefits of living for a long time is that, having so many more dead than living friends, death can appear as a step backwards into the joyous past...
Failures to love are irremediable and irredeemable.
A minor symptom of wars is the cancerous growth of committees.
If you think with enough energy about a hoped-for event, it will in the end happen. Not because you willed it. Because it was all the time in your nature.
No one asks public men to be strictly moral, but they must seem to be well-behaved.
In Europe, war is a disease which has been in the family for generations: no one is surprised when it makes another leap. Even the patient only attends to it with part of his mind.
An animal is not cruel; it lives wholly in the instant leap on its prey, in the present taste of marrow or blood. Cruelty begins with the memory, and the pleasures of the memory are impure; they draw their strength along levels where no sun has reached.
The strangest thing about life is not its frightful cruelty, but that it can be gentle.
The past is able to close round certain moments, as if they were seeds, and deliver them again fresh and living in the present.
A nation has honor precisely as it has fleas – on this or that body. The statesman who talks of honor – unless he means something else, quite different – is a rogue...
Writers sometimes talk as though they were the only friends of civilization. This is their conceit. But they have special powers to serve – or to corrupt – civilization, and are obliged to use them.
Not literature alone, but society itself is wormed and rotten when language ceases to be respected not merely by advertisers and politicians, but by persons of learning and authority.
Pornography is essentially reductive, an exercise in the nothing-but mode, a depersonalizing of the human beings involved, a showing-up of human lust as nothing but an affair of the genitals.
Critics have been amusing themselves for a long time by auscultating fiction for signs of heart failure.
The writer – more especially the novelist – who has not, at one moment or another, considered his publisher unworthy of him, has still to be conceived.
You can’t argue with a raging want. You can, but it is useless.
Sadistic literature is not only inhumane. It is anti-human.
The critic’s hankering to be law-giver rather than servant of literature is irrepressible.