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.

Understanding is often a prelude to forgiveness, but they are not the same, and we often forgive what we cannot understand (seeing nothing else to do) and understand what we cannot pardon.

... 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.

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

What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.

Illiteracy at the poverty level (mainly a matter of bad grammar) does not alarm me nearly as much as the illiteracy of the well-to-do.

The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the brother of talk after dinner.