Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of modern cowardice.

Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.

No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.

The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe.

Approaching forty, I had a singular dream in which I almost grasped the meaning and understood the nature of what it is that wastes in wasted time.

Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.

That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.