What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.

The Americans are clever. They thoroughly understand things that have to do with money, war, death, sickness. And there is also a real tradition of skepticism in this country.

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

Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it.

It is ironic that a nation that has never experienced a coup d'etat should be so obsessed with the idea of conspiracy.

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

I don't seem to be cynical to myself but how what I say goes down with others is their problem. I'm realistic.