Like all former thinkers, I'm writing a book.

I don't think many writers like their best-known piece of work, particularly when it was written a long time ago.

It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in 19th-century France and England, or 20th-century Russia and America.

God forgives those who invent what they need.

Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter 'repented', changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.

Haven't you lived in the South long enough to know that nothing is ever anybody's fault?