Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.

The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the brother of talk after dinner.

A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.

Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.

Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.

It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.

For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved by a tornado.