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

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

For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.

The return to a favorite novel is generally tied up with changes in oneself that must be counted as improvements, but have the feel of losses. It is like going back to a favorite house, country, person; nothing is where it belongs, including one's heart.

The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has all too much a professional air.

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

Yet friendship, I believe, is essential to intellectuals. It is probably the growth hormone the mind requires as it begins its activity of producing and exchanging ideas. You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk. In the course of my history, not love or marriage so much as friendship has promoted growth.