Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.

Central Europe is full of little countries standing shoulder to shoulder with no window to the sea. They are like the passengers in a rush-hour train which has stopped between stations for three centuries. And they all hate one another. And they're all crushed together waving their national flags, clanking their national chains, jabbering their national language.

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.

Style, in the broadest sense of all, is consciousness. More specifically it is a consistent idiom arising spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained.

The gymnasiacs of Venice, in California, are so addicted to these practices that there has arisen a nation of men who can no longer put their arms against their sides

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?'