The relation between life and literature - a final antimony - is one of mutual plagiarism.

This grossly advertised wonder [Venice], this gold idol with clay feet, this trompe-l'oeil, this painted deception, this cliche-what intelligent iconoclast could fail to experience a destructive impulse in her presence?

The consumer today is the victim of the manufacturer who launches on him a regiment of products for which he must make room in his soul.

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.

To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.

love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.