Once divested of missionary virus, the cult of our gods gives no offence. It would be a peaceful age if this were recognized, and religion, Christian, communist or any other, were to rely on practice and not on conversion for her growth.

I do dislike people with Moral Aims. Everyone asks me why I learn Arabic, and when I say I just like it, they looked shocked and incredulous.

monotony is not to be worshipped as a virtue; nor the marriage bed treated as a coffin for security rather than a couch from which to rise refreshed.

A part of all art is to make silence speak. The things left out in painting, the note withheld in music, the void in architecture - all are as necessary and as active as the utterance itself.

Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.

What I find trying in a country which you do not understand and where you cannot speak, is that you can never be yourself.

From love one can only escape at the price of life itself; and no lessening of sorrow is worth exile from that stream of all things human and divine.