It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day.

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

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.

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

A devotion to humanity is... too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.

To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.