The only form of action open to a child is to break something or strike someone, its mother or another child; it cannot cause things to happen in the world.

My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.

The Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around.

Leisure was the sine qua non of the full Renaissance. The feudal nobility, having lost its martial function, sought diversion all over Europe in cultivated pastimes: sonneteering, the lute, games and acrostics, travel, gentlemanly studies and sports, hunting and hawking, treated as arts.

Who are the advertising men kidding, besides the European tourist? Between the tired, sad, gentle faces of the subway riders and the grinning Holy Families of the Ad-Mass, there exists no possibility of even a wishful identification.

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

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