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Quotes by Novelist
"The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame."
116
"Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation."
114
"I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come."
112
"I believe that man will not merely endure. He will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."
111
"There are as many kinds of anger as there are of the sunsets with which they ought to end."
111
"I found myself with a perseverance worthy of a much better cause."
111
"Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb."
108
"I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind, but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature."
107
"When a deep injury is done us, we never recover until we forgive."
105
"Love does not exist. There exists the physical need for intercourse, and the rational need for a mate in life."
103
"Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it."
102
"Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it."
101
"The only thing that I was equipped for with my very mediocre college Arts degree was to get a job in teaching."
99
"Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius."
99
"We don't need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writer's movement: assertive, militant, pugnacious."
99
"If you want to control someone, all you have to do is to make them feel afraid."
97
"The greatest things are accomplished by individual people, not by committees or companies."
95
"In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. 'I don't want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don't see what use he is."
95
"In all nations an exceptional man exists that compensates the deficiencies of the remainder. In those moments, when humanity is found collectively in a state of decadence, there always remain those exceptional beings as point of reference."
94
"He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: "Only God knows how much I loved you."
94
"It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure."
93
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
93
"The vast and terrible depth.'Of course, he said.'The inexhaustibility.'I understand.'The whole huge nameless thing.'Yes, absolutely.'The massive darkness.'Certainly, certainly.'The whole terrible endless hugeness.'I know exactly what you mean."
93
"The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness."
91
"Loving is not just looking at each other, it's looking in the same direction."
91
"At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don't see how your gestures already mirror his; you don't see him in the way you hold your body, in the way you sign your name. You don't hear his whisper in your blood."
91
"World War I was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought."
91
"I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen."
88
"A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream."
88
"If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed."
88
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