“One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.”

The simplest explanation is always the most likely.

Fiction is founded on truth unless things did happen, people couldn’t think of them.

There are questions that you don’t ask because you’re afraid of the answers to them.

I learned that one can never go back, that one should not ever try to go back – that the essence of life is going forward. Life is really a one way street, isn’t it?

Everyone is a potential murderer-in everyone there arises from time to time thewish to kill-though not the will to kill.

One must accept the fact that we have only one companion in this world, a companion who accompanies us from the cradle to the grave – our own self. Get on good terms with that companion – learn to live with yourself.

Very few of us are what we seem.

Writing is a great comfort to people like me, who are unsure of themselves and have trouble expressing themselves properly.

I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming… suddenly you find – at the age of 50, say – that a whole new life has opened before you.

There is nothing more thrilling in this world, I think, than having a child that is yours, and yet is mysteriously a stranger.

Books are a habit-forming drug.

If you’ve had a happy childhood, nobody can take that away from you.

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

The happy people are failures because they are on such good terms with themselves they don’t give a damn.

There’s too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.

One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is, I think, to have a happy childhood.

You may be a disaster for a day, a month, or a year. Just don’t be a disaster forever.

Sometimes nothing is happening and all that disaster just happens in your mind.

We made a mess of this love, you and I. Forever the most beautiful disaster.

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a humanitarian disaster. Please wear a mask.

Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the major geopolitical disaster of the century.

All Earthquakes and Disasters are warnings; there’s too much corruption in the world.

Economic disaster begins with a philosophy of doing less and wanting more.