You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. [and then you discover that others have suffered much more than you and your problems look good in comparison]

I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.

A man's balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.

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

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

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.

Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.