The breakdown of our language, evident in the misuse, i.e., the misunderstanding of nouns and adjectives, is most grave, though perhaps not so conspicuous, in the handling of prepositions, those modest little connectives that hold the parts of a phrase or a sentence together. They are the joints of any language, what make it, literally, articulate.

The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has all too much a professional air.

If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.

The dictator is also the scapegoat; in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt; and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance.

To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.

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.