The breeding we give young people is ordinarily but an additional self-love, by which we make them have a better opinion of themselves.

Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.

All women are flirts, but some are restrained by shyness, and others by sense.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.

There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.

Nothing hinders a thing from being natural so much as the straining ourselves to make it seem so.

Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.

Most people know no other way of judging men's worth but by the vogue they are in, or the fortunes they have met with.

There are no accidents so unlucky from which clever people are not able to reap some advantage, and none so lucky that the foolish are not able to turn them to their own disadvantage.

When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women

There are no words for so much loss, not right after it happens.

One fails forward toward success.

The great man is not the child of his age but its step-child.

I think it's fine for a singer to sing someone else's song. But the thing I don't like is when a singer that can write songs starts getting someone else to do it for them.

Noir is dead for me because historically, I think it's a simple view. I've taken it as far as it can go. I think I've expanded on it a great deal, taken it further than any other American novelist.

If you are a novelist of a certain type of termperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist except he was a Realist.

It is not difficult to censor foreign news. What is difficult today is to censor one's own thoughts, To sit by and see the blind man On the sightless horse, riding into the bottomless abyss.

Failure seems to be nature's plan for preparing us for great responsibilities.

What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?