It is impossible, except for theologians, to conceive of a world-wide scandal or a universe-wide scandal; the proof of this is the way people have settled down to living with nuclear fission, radiation poisoning, hydrogen bombs, satellites, and space rockets.

... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.

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

Venice is the worlds unconscious: a misers glittering hoard, guarded by a Beast whose eyes are made of white agate, and by a saint who is really a prince who has just slain a dragon.

Maybe any action becomes cowardly once you stop to reason about it.

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