Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.

Journalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried.

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living.

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.