[On newspapers:] A first draft of history.

Democracy, like any non-coercive relationship, rests on a shared understanding of limits.

People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs. People are very inclined to set moral standards for others.

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

The Republicans’ plan is that if they can’t buy the 2012 election they will steal it.

The world is not run by thought, nor by imagination, but by opinion.

How frail and ephemeral is the material substance of letters, which makes their very survival so hazardous. Print has a permanence of its own, though it may not be much worth preserving, but a letter! Conveyed by uncertain transportation, over which the sender has no control; committed to a single individual who may be careless or inappreciative; left to the mercy of future generations, of families maybe anxious to suppress the past, of the accidents of removals and house-cleanings, or of mere ignorance. How often it has been by the veriest chance that they have survived at all.