The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.
Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.
Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute.
I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.
[On Jane Austen] She was fully possessed of the idealism which is a necessary ingredient of the great satirist. If she criticized the institutions of earth, it was because she had very definite ideas regarding the institutions of heaven.
You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.
To be afraid of sorrow is to be afraid of joy also.
She understood children, and knew that they were adults handicapped by a humiliating disguise and had their adult qualities within them.
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
People call me a feminist whenever I express statements that distinguish me from a doormat.
Through this evening of sentences cut short because their completed meaning was always sorrow, of normal life dissolved to tears, the chords of Beethoven sounded serenely.
Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
[N]obody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.
Now I recall my emotions at that moment, children seem to me a remarkable race. They want so much to murder so many people, and they so rarely murder anybody at all.
For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition.
Their faces were clay-coloured and featureless, yet not stupid; they might have been shrewd turnips.
There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues. That is all.
There is a definite process by which one made people into friends and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.
Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds even if it is the salt of the earth.
I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure as a test of value.
It is the soul’s duty to be loyal to its own desires.
People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person’s mind.
Journalism: an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space.
There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.