The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.

Time spent in a casino is time given to death, a foretaste of the hour when one's flesh will be diverted to the purposes of the worm and not of the will.

Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.

The mind is its own enemy, that fights itself with the innumerable pliant and ineluctable arms of the octopus.

Margaret Thatcher has one great advantage - she is a daughter of the people and looks trim, as the daughter of the people desire to be. Shirley Williams has such an advantage over her because she's a member of the upper-middle class and can achieve the kitchen-sink revolutionary look that one cannot get unless one has been to a really good school.

[On Jane Austen:] To believe her limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond.

I don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.