I don't want to see libraries close; I want to find local solutions that will make them sustainable.
Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.
The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.
The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.
Now I know the full power of evil. It makes ugliness seem beautiful and goodness seem ugly and weak.
Weak minds sink under prosperity as well as adversity; but strong and deep ones have two high tides.
The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.
IF YOU PRETEND THE CHARACTERS CANT SPEAK, AND WRITE A SILENT MOVIE, YOU WILL BE WRITING GREAT DRAMA.
There's no demand for a body of work, though writers will be criticized for not having produced one.
One of the most adventurous things left us is to go to bed. For no one can lay a hand on our dreams.
The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is absolutely saturated with drama.
I think isolation is one of the greatest problems, an ever-growing obstacle to political solidarity.
I'm not one of those women writers who are obsessed by their ego, possibly because I don't have one.
Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.
You said they had found the secret of happiness because they had never heard that love can be a sin.
a person who was clever ought to be clever enough not to be unjust or deliberately unkind to anyone.
What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
Vegetarians claim to be immune from most diseases but they have been known to die from time to time.
But to admire a strong person and to live under that strong person’s thumb are two different things.
All autobiographies are lies. I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies: I mean deliberate lies.
The lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book.
I'm the most democratic fascist you'll ever meet. I listen to everybody, and then I make a decision.
It was difficult being a conscientious objector in the 1940's, but I felt I had to stick to my guns.
Writing has... been to me like a bath from which I have risen feeling cleaner, healthier, and freer.
Every novelist has a different purpose-and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.
Nothing in life is fair. Fair is a dirty word and I'll thank you not to use that language around me.
The general knowledge of time on the island depends, curiously enough, on the direction of the wind.
Trying to do better is trying to be better than you actually are, and I don't think you can do that.
I love accents, I love listening to people talk, I like to try to emulate it as accurately as I can.
Writers are given one great story to tell their story. I’m telling my story as a political document.
Mama - Mama - I want so many things... I want so many things that they are driving me kind of crazy.
I never really tell anyone what I'm writing beforehand because I usually don't know what it will be.
The true sage is not he who sees, but he who, seeing the furthest, has the deepest love for mankind.
No matter what everybody says, ultimately these things can harm us only by the way we react to them.
Avoid that romantic trap: saying more than you feel, forcing yourself to feel more than you've said!