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I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.

Living in a cultural milieu where the foreign writers most widely available and admired were Russian, I came very late to postwar American writers, and I had great trouble with the canonically exalted white male writers I tried first.

I was going to be the best failed novelist in Paris. That was certainly not the worst thing in the world that one could be.

I had no ambition to be a writer because the books I read were too good, my standards were too high.

When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.

I'm definitely more influenced by European writers than I am by American writers, there's no doubt about that.

When I wrote about the French Revolution, I didn't choose to write about aristocrats; I chose characters who began their lives in provincial obscurity.

I myself owe everything to French books. They developed in my soul the sentiments of humanity which had been stifled by eight years of fanatical and servile education.

I couldn't have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was.

I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.