Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted. Spicy court-memoirs, the lives of gallant ladies, recollections of an ex-nun, a monk's confession, an atheist's repentance, true-to-life accounts of prostitution and bastardy gave our ancestors a penny peep into the forbidden room.

If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.

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.

People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.

Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes.

In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.

With extramarital courtship, the deception was prolonged where it had been ephemeral, necessary where it had been frivolous, conspiratorial where it had been lonely.