If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil; never anticipate it.

If you talked or laughed in church, told lies, had impure thoughts or conversations, you were bad; if you obeyed your parents or guardians, went to confession and communion regularly, said prayers for the dead, you were good.

It is impossible, except for theologians, to conceive of a world-wide scandal or a universe-wide scandal; the proof of this is the way people have settled down to living with nuclear fission, radiation poisoning, hydrogen bombs, satellites, and space rockets.

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

it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.

The idea of Macbeth as a conscience-torm ented man is a platitude as false as Macbeth himself. Macbeth has no conscience. His main concern throughout the play is that most selfish of all concerns: to get a good night's sleep.

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