The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belong to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.

And all that time I couldn't work. So much of a novelist's writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written be…

'God save us always,' I said, 'from the innocent and the good.'

I was trying to write a book that simply would not come. I did my daily five hundred words, but the characters never began to live. So much in writing depends …

On n'est heureux que par l'amour.

I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys.

There 's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away.