Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.

Because I was raised in a Christian culture I never considered myself to be a totally free human being.

It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

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.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.

The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

Europe has what we [Americans] do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.