Funeral expenses are the curse of the poor everywhere on earth, they are wasteful and unnecessary, they are the price of foolish ostentation and a display that is less an evidence of grief than a vulgar travesty of those pompous obsequies where no grief is.

To forgive is wisdom, to forget is genius.

No one can estimate the power of authority among poor and uneducated people in a world whose problems confuse even the wisest.

Reality is a narrow little house which becomes a prison to those who can't get out of it.

The concept, the label, is perpetually hiding from us all the nature of the real.

Politics is like navigation in a sea without charts, and wise men live the lives of pilgrims.

I write the big scenes first, that is, the scenes that carry the meaning of the book, the emotional experience.