Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

Journalism: an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space.

God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.

International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other, but it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves.