It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the "fronts" people assume before one another's eyes, and the "front" a writer puts on the face of reality.
Only by pursuing the extremes in one's nature, with all its contradictions, appetites, aversions, rages, can one hope to understand a little - oh, I admit only a very little - of what life is about.
I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.
After Proust, there are certain things that simply cannot be done again. He marks off for you the boundaries of your talent.
What you call types of mind are only mental ages.
The rich have a passion for bargains as lively as it is pointless.
When man, Apollo man, rockets into space, it isn't in order to find his brother, I'm quite sure of that. It's to confirm that he hasn't any brothers.
Houses are for private living, for friends, and for dogs.