They were not friends. They didn't know each other. It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst was that there would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that he and they were completely in harmony and alike. For an instant the wordless shock of his realization seemed more than he could bear.

For neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not.

And no book, and possibly no painting, when it is finished, is ever exactly like the first dream of it.

I didn't hang around films. I don't know if I'd ever seen Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.

This is what I like, sitting at a table and watching people go by. It does something to your outlook on life. The Anglo-Saxons make a great mistake not staring at people from a sidewalk table.

What was it to love someone, what was love exactly, and why did it end or not end? Those were the real questions, and who could answer them?

I prefer to live in the country where it's quiet. Woody Allen movies there are dubbed into Italian.