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.

it came to me, as we sat there, glumly ordering lunch, that for extremely stupid people anti-Semitism was a form of intellectuality, the sole form of intellectuality of which they were capable. It represented, in a rudimentary way, the ability to make categories, to generalize.

A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.

On the wall of our life together hung a gun waiting to be fired in the final act.

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.

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

The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable.