It is astonishing to think that millions of people in my time—now, too, I suppose—actually thought that at a given moment in history two human beings had evolved to a higher state than that of all the gods that ever were or ever will be. This is titanism, as the Greeks would say. This is madness.

I suppose my liking for Italy is partly atavism, my family are of the old Roman stock. They came from the Alps north of Venice.

Nixon was a Southern Rim President, and so antipathetic to the old guard.

Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad, just as liars always believe liars.

A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren't they?

Everybody has two legs, two lobes to the brain which is why we tend to be interested in symmetry, always balancing things.

All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.