I like the distance that Europe gives me. Also if I stayed in America I'd be a full-time politician and have no time for writing, which is why I went to Europe to live in 1961.

...you will do more harm than good by attempting to supplant old dogmas and customs with new dogmas. It will be the same in the end except that the old is less militant, less dangerous than a new order imposed by enthusiasts.

The family in the West is finished... its origin was economic, not biological... the odd group of strangers that make up every family no longer have any reason to live together, to suffer from one another's jagged edges.

We must always remember that the police are recruited from the criminal classes.

What is there to say, finally, except that pain is bad and pleasure good, life all, death nothing.

In matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed.

I went to Europe to live in 1961. I'd never have written Julian if it hadn't been for the sequestered life that I led in Rome and the classical library at the America Academy.