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.

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

Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.

Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.

it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.

All ideas advanced to deal with the Florentine noise problem, the Florentine traffic problem, are Utopian, and nobody believes in them, just as nobody believed in Machiavelli's Prince, a Utopian image of the ideally self-interested despot.

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