The present can try to bury the past, an operation that is most atrocious when it is most successful.

The comic element is the incorrigible element in every human being; the capacity to learn, from experience or instruction, is what is forbidden to all comic creations and to what is comic in you and me.

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that ... you really must make the self. It is absolutely useless to look for it, you won't find it, but it's possible in some sense to make it. I don't mean in the sense of making a mask, a Yeatsian mask. But you finally begin in some sense to make and choose the self you want.

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

You mustn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.

The perennial wonder of Venice is to peer at herself in her canals and find that she exists-incredible as it seems. It is the same reassurance that a looking-glass offers us: the guarantee that we are real.