When you aren't sincere you need to pretend, and by pretending you end up believing yourself; that's the basic principle of every faith.

And we all know love is a glass which makes even a monster appear fascinating.

The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read and write.

The less one notices happiness, the greater it is.

It is what we are forced to do that forms our character, not what we do of our own free will.

Dictatorships are one-way streets. Democracy boasts two-way traffic.

I do not foresee a time when I shall feel that I have nothing to say.

I like to compare my method with that of painters centuries ago, proceeding from layer to layer.

War has become an affair of machines...and soldiers are little more than clever mechanics.

The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.

I don't think it's possible to write a good novel around a negative personality.

Because things are not agreeable, " said Jean Valjean, "that is no reason for being unjust towards God.

Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.

It's hard to look at things that are too close.

In an active life is sown the seed of wisdom... And age, if it has not esteem, has nothing.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!

I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.

Mark my words, my rap career [is] on the rise.

My love affairs were more often about the fantasy than the actual person I was involved with.

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

All the resources we need are in the mind.