One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.

Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.

Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one's self to be bored.

Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn't changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It's the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.

We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.

What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.