“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”

“There's the risk of being loved...and that would keep me from being happy.”

“Spring declares itself solely in the quality of the air or the little baskets of flowers that street-sellers bring in from the suburbs; this is a spring that is sold in the market-place.”

“A life, whose purpose is money, is death.”

“Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds -- a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents”

“The great novelists are philosophical novelists--that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.”

“As the death of the writer exaggerates the role of his work, the death of a person exaggerates the role of his effect on us.”