The Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around.

An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.

In moments of despair, we look on ourselves lead-enly as objects; we see ourselves, our lives, as someone else might see them and may even be driven to kill ourselves if the separation, the "knowledge," seems sufficiently final.

The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers; suspicion is reserved for friends.

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

...the tourist Venice is Venice.

The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.