I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.

European society has always been divided into classes in a way that American society never has been. A European writer considers himself to be part of an old and honorable tradition--of intellectual activity, of letters--and his choice of a vocation does not cause him any uneasy wonder as to whether or not it will cost him all his friends. But this tradition does not exist in America.

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.