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

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

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.

We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.

The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof

A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.