No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.

Of all men the drunkard is the foulest. The thief when he is not stealing is like another. The extortioner does not practice in the home. The murderer when he is at home can wash his hands. But the drunkard stinks and vomits in this own bed and dissolves his organs in alcohol.

War is no longer made by simply analyzed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule.

The people that I liked and had not met went to the big cafes because they were lost in them and no one noticed them and they could be alone in them and be together.

What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.

Perhaps wars weren't won anymore. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years' War.

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.