“When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.”

Truth never penetrates an unwilling mind.

The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line.

What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?

There’s no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.

Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.

In general, every country has the language it deserves.

I think most people are more important than their opinions.

The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful.

We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !

The future is as irrevocable as an inflexible yesterday.

I would rather like to think of God as being a kind of adventurer – even as Wells thought about him – or perhaps as something within us making for some unknown purpose.

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.

The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy.

What a writer wants to do is not what he does.

Blindness has not been for me a total misfortune; it should not be seen in a pathetic way. It should be seen as a way of life: one of the styles of living.

We have a very precise image – an image at times shameless – of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.