On the wall of our life together hung a gun waiting to be fired in the final act.

Making love, we are all more alike than we are when we are talking or acting.

The only form of action open to a child is to break something or strike someone, its mother or another child; it cannot cause things to happen in the world.

love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.

The dictator is also the scapegoat; in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt; and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance.

The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers; suspicion is reserved for friends.

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