"Silent gratitude isn't very much to anyone."

"It is funny the two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son."

"It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death."

"Just as everybody has the vote including women, I think children should, because as a child is conscious of itself then it has to me an existence and has a stake in what happens."

"Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening."

"Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it."

"I don't envisage collectivism. There is no such animal, it is always individualism, sometimes the rest vote and sometimes they do not, and if they do they do and if they do not they do not."

"Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something."

"Action and reaction are equal and opposite."

"It is funny that men who are supposed to be scientific cannot get themselves to realise the basic principle of physics, that action and reaction are equal and opposite, that when you persecute people you always rouse them to be strong and stronger."

"The earth is the earth as a peasant sees it, the world is the world as a duchess sees it, and anyway a duchess would be nothing if the earth was not there as the peasant sees it."

"Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen."

"It is not what France gave you but what it did not take from you that was important."

"It is so friendly so simply friendly and though inevitable not a sadness and though occurring not a shock."

"It is natural not to care about a sister certainly not when she is four years older and grinds her teeth at night."

"I've been rich and I've been poor. It's better to be rich."

"A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables."

"I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich."

"It is extraordinary that when you are acquainted with a whole family you can forget about them."

"The nineteenth century was completely lacking in logic, it had cosmic terms and hopes, and aspirations, and discoveries, and ideals but it had no logic."

"History takes time. History makes memory."

"Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers' granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages."

"Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense."

"I think the reason I am important is that I know everything."

"Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family."

"Oh, I wish I were a miser; being a miser must be so occupying."

"That is what war is and dancing it is forward and back, when one is out walking one wants not to go back the way they came but in dancing and in war it is forward and back."

"Sculpture is made with two instruments and some supports and pretty air."

"This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition."

"Everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense."

"The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it."

"The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not."

"What is music. A passion for colonies not a love of country."

"In France one must adapt oneself to the fragrance of a urinal."

"It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken."

"What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?"

"The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing."

"Men cannot count, they do not know that two and two make four if women do not tell them so."

"I rarely believe anything, because at the time of believing I am not really there to believe."

"Is it worse to be scared than to be bored, that is the question."

"Once more I can climb about and remind you that a woman in this epoch does the important literary thinking."

"Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood."

"Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable."

"War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost."

"In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is."

"It is awfully important to know what is and what is not your business."

"You'll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived."

"It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing."

"A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears."

"Very likely education does not make very much difference."