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

I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand.

A politician or political thinker who calls himself a political realist is usually boasting that he sees politics, so to speak, in the raw; he is generally a proclaimed cynic and pessimist who makes it his business to look behind words and fine speeches for the motive. This motive is always low.

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

The rationalist mind has always had its doubts about Venice. The watery city receives a dry inspection, as though it were a myth for the credulous- poets and honeymooners.

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