The lake and the mountains have become my landscape, my real world..

If each one of us could make just one other happy, the whole world would know happiness..

I have made love to ten thousand women..

I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words..

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy..

Madame....gloatingly savored her words as earlier she had savored her pig's trotter..

We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full..

The place smelled of fairgrounds, of lazy crowds, of nights when you stayed out because you couldn't go to bed, and it smelled like New York, of its ….

For 30 years I have tried to make it understood that there are no criminals..

I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink..

I am at home everywhere, and nowhere. I am never a stranger and I never quite belong..

I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood..

A novelist is a man who doesn't like his mother..

I adore life but I dont fear death. I just prefer to die as late as possible..

One of them, for example, which will probably haunt me more than any other is the problem of communication..

I write fast, because I have not the brains to write slow..

And Boucard desisted, probably because like everyone else he was deeply impressed by this man who had laid all ghosts, who had lost all shadows, and ….

The fact that we are I don't know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of tho….

It was night and I could see a large and calm lake, reflecting the moon. Black mountains rose around it. I arrived from between two of these mountain….

We live in a time when writers do not always have barriers around them.

It just happened. As though a moment comes when it's both necessary and natural to make a decision that has long since been made..