Anybody who has ever tried to rectify an injustice or set a record straight comes to feel that he is going mad.

What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.

To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

The relation between life and literature - a final antimony - is one of mutual plagiarism.

The Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around.

The consumer today is the victim of the manufacturer who launches on him a regiment of products for which he must make room in his soul.

The famous Florentine elegance, which attracts tourists to the shops on Via Tornabuoni and Via della Vigna Nuova, is characterized by austerity of line, simplicity, economy of effect.