I despise my own nation most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from Hope. For me, that's patrotism.

Among politicians and businessmen, *Pragmatism* is the current term for 'To hell with our children.'

Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.

Any hack can safely rail away at foreign powers beyond the sea; but a good writer is a critic of the society he lives in.

Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov or Borges) that can betray the writer into technique for the sake of technique.

I have written much about many good places. But the best places of all, I have never mentioned.