No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.

Perfect love may cast our fear, but fear is remarkably potent in casting out love.

I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin.

The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.

Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.

A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.

Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?