“I expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language.”

I write what I call ‘novels of consolation’ for people who are bright and sophisticated.

It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book.

If you’re a writer, you’re always working.

I have a very serious censorship office inside my head; it censors things that I could tell you that you would never forget, and I don’t want to be the person to stick that in your brain.

Live today, for tomorrow we die.

Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower – translated from a French saying

And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini’s armies in Albania.

I’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.

I’m a genre writer.

I don’t really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.

the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said

I don’t inflict horrors on readers.

Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It’s where it all began and ended.

On the Greek frontier, one wasn’t sure what came next. So, don’t trust the telephone. Or the newspapers. Or the radio. Or tomorrow.

My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else’s books.

Showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.

My stories do have plot. They’re not just scattered language; they’re controlled, toward an end.

There is no ‘cat language.’ Painful as it is for us to admit, they don’t need one!

Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express.

There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

Would I describe a preacher, I would express him simple, grave, sincere; In doctrine uncorrupt; in language plain, And plain in manner; decent, solemn, chaste,

The true Way is sublime. It can’t be expressed in language. Of what use are scriptures? But someone who sees his own nature finds the Way, even if he can’t read a word.