Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers; suspicion is reserved for friends.

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

Life for the European is a career; for the American it is a hazard.

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

For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.