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

The present can try to bury the past, an operation that is most atrocious when it is most successful.

I was going to get myself recognized at any price. If I could not win fame by goodness, I was ready to do it by badness.

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

The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.

Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.

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.