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

If someone tells you he is going to make a 'realistic decision', you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.

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.

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

America is indeed a revelation, though not quite the one that was planned. Given a clean slate, man, it was hoped, would write the future. Instead, he has written his past.

The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.

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