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

To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.

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

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.

Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.

The horror of Gandhi's murder lies not in the political motives behind it or in its consequences for Indian policy or for the future of non-violence; the horror lies simply in the fact that any man could look into the face of this extraordinary person and deliberately pull a trigger.

... 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.