History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.

To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.

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

I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be - not to have a 'career', but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer.

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

Life is that which - pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially - interrupts.

Travelers are fantasists, conjurers, seers - and what they finally discover is that every round object everywhere is a crystal ball: stone, teapot, the marvelous globe of the human eye.