If you are at the mercy of what they call print interviews and the mercy of people who write about you, they can always tell lies.

The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.

Before the cards that one is dealt by life are the cards that fate has dealt: one's family.

Between Malraux, Balzac, and Montaigne, I choose Montaigne. Montaigne will survive all the others, because the essay, meaning direct communication between the writer and his reader, will outlast the novel, by at least a thousand years.

Where there is no desire or pursuits, there is no wholeness. But there are satisfying lesser states, fragments.

For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.