Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.

Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.

History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.

Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence . Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French word for life-jacket.

But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.

Why should anything happen when everything has happened?

Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.