What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.

Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.

The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten; the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.

Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.

There are days when I'll wake up and think, oh, I've really been something. You know, it won't be the same without me. And then there are days when I wake up and I say, 'Don't kid yourself. Your contribution was minimal. You changed very little. Everything you hated prospered'.

The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again; it has perhaps not been here so intensely in thirty years, not since the Nazis were prospering, but it is coming back.

The way you write affects what you say.