You'll see some bad things, but if you didn't see them, they'd still be happening..

When I had a few francs, I spent them at a café on the Place de Longchamps, a block or so from my pension, where I could order a glass of Beaujolais ….

When there's a terrible murder people who are interviewed say, 'This has always been a quiet neighborhood.' That is so dumb and uninformed! The earth….

A year and a half after the end of the war and the German occupation, Paris was muted and looked bruised and forlorn. Everywhere I went, I sensed the….

The density of people in society is so thick that we forget that life will end one day. And we don't know when that one-day will be. So please, tell ….

Life was an impenetrable mystery cloaked in babble..

Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life..

I've always known a lot of very bad people, destructive, brutes of a certain kind. Then I've seen these lovely impulses and what not, and they've sta….

Freedom is a public library..

Words are nets through which all truth escapes..

It was hard to reassure grown-ups when you weren't certain yourself what you were feeling and thinking—when thoughts dissolved before you could name ….

My father brought me a box of books once when I was about three and a half or four. I remember the carton they were in and the covers with illustrati….

And what movies we saw! All the actors and actresses whose photographs I collected, with their look of eternity! Their radiance, their eyes, their fa….

There was no way to grasp the reality of the present which slid away each second, invisible as air; reality only existed after the fact, in one's vis….

I don't know what makes a writer's voice. It's dozens of things. There are people who write who don't have it. They're tone-deaf, even though they're….

we are, in this country, more open to new ideas. But we are also, it seems to me, more inclined to hail the new as absolute truth - until the next ne….

There's a certain amount of tyranny in all of us to some extent, and in some people it's much more developed than in others. It's a different balance….

The truth came slowly like a story told by people interrupting each other..

I like to cook; it is, for me, a happy combination of mindlessness and purpose..