Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over-animation. One can either see or be seen.

So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.

I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.