"When a war is won, it's the losers, not the winners, who are liberated."

"Disease-carrying thoughts swarm and multiply in the dark and twisted labyrinths of our minds, and all that is needed …"

"I sat day after day in my little room, waiting for inspiration to visit me, trying to invent a pseudonym that would e…"

"A writer’s subconscious is one of the filthiest places there are: as a matter of fact, you can find the whole world t…"

"There is more to Jewish history than Auschwitz."

"Gari in Russian means "burn!"… I want to test myself, a trial by fire, so that my I is burned off."

"During the war he was an airman and slaughtered civilians from on high."

"The gossip that came back to me from fashionable dinners where people pitied poor Romain Gary, who must be a little s…"

"Humour is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him."

"The bombs I dropped on Germany between 1940 and 1944 maybe killed a Rilke or a Goethe or a Hölderin in his cradle. An…"