Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.

What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.

The diminution of the reality of class, however socially desirable in many respects, seems to have the practical effect of diminishing our ability to see people in their difference and specialness.

I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.

Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.

We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.

Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader