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

We are the hero of our own story.

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.

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.

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

The things of this world reveal their essential absurdity when they are put in the Venetian context. In the unreal realm of the canals, as in a Swiftian Lilliput, the real world, with its contrivances, appears as a vast folly.

In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.