The young are so much more vulnerable than the old – the stuff is still warm and malleable, it takes impressions.

Perhaps this is in the end what most marriages are – gentleness, memory, and habit.

A joke is a joke or the image of a truth...

I do not think about absent persons as often or with such intense longing as I think of places. They lie one below the other in my mind...

Language is one of the thin walls humanity has built up over centuries against its own bestial and destructive impulses...

Think of all the really successful men and women you know. Do you know a single one who didn’t learn very young the trick of calling attention to himself in the right quarters?

A nation has honor precisely as it has fleas – on this or that body. The statesman who talks of honor – unless he means something else, quite different – is a rogue...

Could anything be absurder than a man? The animal who knows everything about himself – except why he was born and the meaning of his unique existence.

All pornography is to a degree sadistic – inevitably.

Writers sometimes talk as though they were the only friends of civilization. This is their conceit. But they have special powers to serve – or to corrupt – civilization, and are obliged to use them.