Altruism is a brief phase through which some adolescents must pass. It is rather like acne. Happily, as with acne, only a few are permanently scarred.

...I'm no longer the scales most lovers are, weighing the deeds and gifts and treasures proffered against those received or stolen from the other, trying always to bring into fatal balance two separate things.

When anyone says to me, 'Can you keep a secret?' I say, 'Why should I, if you can't?'

Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more.

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

Yet in a society of conflicting interests the only democratic way in which matters can be improved is through politics, and politics means the compromising of extremes in order to achieve that notorious half loaf which the passionate and the outraged never find sufficient.

I suppose that one is always tempted to challenge those who think that they and they alone possess the truth or the way or the key to the mystery.