The labor of keeping house is labor in its most naked state, for labor is toil that never finishes, toil that has to be begun again the moment it is completed, toil that is destroyed and consumed by the life process

The idea of Macbeth as a conscience-torm ented man is a platitude as false as Macbeth himself. Macbeth has no conscience. His main concern throughout the play is that most selfish of all concerns: to get a good night's sleep.

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

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

The perennial wonder of Venice is to peer at herself in her canals and find that she exists-incredible as it seems. It is the same reassurance that a looking-glass offers us: the guarantee that we are real.

If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil; never anticipate it.

The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the brother of talk after dinner.