Here in the city the worst thing that can happen to a nation has happened: we are a people afraid of its youth.

Houses of evil similarity appeared like rows of disciplined, humiliated orphans.

In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin — consideration for their feelings. As it usually turns out this is an enormous, unthinkable inflation few men will remit, or if they will, only with a sense of being overcharged.

Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy.

Flattery is a challenge. The proper turning away from it, undercutting, diminishing it without offense or vehemence, is a social grace sweeter even than the swift determination to keep ahead in the race of hospitality.

Sex can no longer be the germ, the seed of fiction. Sex is an episode, most properly conveyed in an episodic manner, quickly, often ironically. It is a bursting forth of only one of the cells in the body of the omnipotent I, the one who hopes by concentration of tone and voice to utter the sound of reality.

Since films and television have staged everything imaginable before it happens, a true event, taking place in the real world, brings to mind the landscape of films.