Others are to us like the characters in fiction, eternal and incorrigible; the surprises they give us turn out in the end to have been predictable and unexpected variations on the theme of being themselves.

I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that - how to express this - you really must make the self.

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.

Driving a car, you are in danger of killing; walking or standing, of being killed.

It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.

The return to a favorite novel is generally tied up with changes in oneself that must be counted as improvements, but have the feel of losses. It is like going back to a favorite house, country, person; nothing is where it belongs, including one's heart.

Any sizeable Portuguese town looks like a superstitious bride's finery - something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.