The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.

The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.

Time at length becomes justice.

Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible.

In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.

Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.

What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.