Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.

A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.

The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

The land of embarrassment and breakfast.

When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.

Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.

The more you learn, the less you fear. "Learn" not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.

It was as if - this something I thought of only later, of course - she were gently peeling back one layer after another that covered a person's heart, a very sensual feeling.

In times of suffering, don't turn inward to self-pity or outward to revenge, but turn to the lover of your soul, Jesus.

Was it possible that perhaps the most plausible explanation was being offered by someone who anyone with an ounce of sanity would have long ago consigned to the realm of the insane?

We cannot cure the evils of politics with politics.

Nowhere can it rain harder and with a more tiresome persistence than in California during the brief season when it rains at all.

We shall some day catch an abstract truth by the tail, and then we shall have our religion and our immortality.

The liberating force of technology the instrumentalization of things turns into ... the instrumentalization of man.

I like doing accents and I like learning as much as I can learn.

Dancing and ballets would undoubtedly take on a new lease on life, if the customs established by a spirit of fear and jealousy did not in some way close the path of glory.

What's right is what's left if you do everything else wrong.