“I aim to be content with what I produce. It’s an aim I never achieve, but I go over my work word by word, time and again, so as to be as little dissatisfied as possible.”

We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.

Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.

Sooner or later; one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.

It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.

Destruction after all is a form of creation.

An autobiography is only ‘a sort of life’ – it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.

Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in…We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.

Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.

Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil – or else an absolute ignorance.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.

I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

My mother is my root, my foundation. She planted the seed that I base my life on, and that is the belief that the ability to achieve starts in your mind.

The important achievement of Apollo was demonstrating that humanity is not forever chained to this planet, and our visions go rather further than that, and our opportunities are unlimited.

When your desires are strong enough you will appear to possess superhuman powers to achieve.

The true measure of a successful leader is their ability to discover the hidden talent in those they lead and challenge them to achieve greatness.

Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.

I get by with a little help from my friends.

Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice, and is never the result of selfishness.

You always have to focus in life on what you want to achieve.