Old money is fully as moronic as new money but it has inherited an appearance of cultivation.

The furniture and trappings in the apartment are all in a state of flux - here today, gone tomorrow. Nothing is anchored to its place, not even the coffee-pot, which floats off and returns, on the tide of the signora's marine nature.

The fact is that gardening, more than most of our other activities except sometimes love-making, confronts us with the inexplicable.

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

it came to me, as we sat there, glumly ordering lunch, that for extremely stupid people anti-Semitism was a form of intellectuality, the sole form of intellectuality of which they were capable. It represented, in a rudimentary way, the ability to make categories, to generalize.

The horror of Gandhi's murder lies not in the political motives behind it or in its consequences for Indian policy or for the future of non-violence; the horror lies simply in the fact that any man could look into the face of this extraordinary person and deliberately pull a trigger.

Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.