I am a born novelist, which does not happen all that often. There are people who try to write for a certain time, then they become Ministers of Culture under de Gaulle, and they begin living their own fictions.

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice.

It is reasonable to assume that, by and large, what is not read now will not be read, ever. It is also reasonable to assume that practically nothing that is read now will be read later.

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemmingway and not seen the joke?

One's neighbor is always the enemy. That is the nature of things.

No reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers.