Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.

I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.

This was exactly what the girl had most dreaded all her life and had scrupulously avoided until now: lovemaking without emotion or love. She knew that she had crossed the forbidden boundary, but she proceeded across it without objections and as a full participant; only somewhere, far off in a corner of her consciousness, did she feel horror at the thought that she had never known such pleasure, never so much pleasure as at this moment--beyond that boundary.

Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.

Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.