So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too.

Sooner or later... one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?

God save us always,' I said 'from the innocent and the good.

Its typical of Mexico, of the whole human race perhaps — violence in favour of an ideal and then the ideal lost but the violence just going on.