Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.

It's written into the Constitution that you're allowed to pursue happiness. In England it would be considered a frivolous objective.

I was beaten up wherever I went, and people shouted at me and cursed me and threw things at me.

You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

The ... problem that confronts homosexuals is that they set out to win the love of a "real" man. If they succeed, they fail. A man who "goes with" other men is not what they would call a real man. The conundrum is incapable of resolution, but that does not make homosexuals give it up.

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.

The world now seems a stunningly ignoble place. It has not really grown all that much worse but appears to have done so because we know so much more about it than we did.