I'm afraid there's nothing we can do about the journalists; we can only hope that they will die off as the deerflies do towards the end of August.

If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.

Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.

California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting - the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Here we write well when we expose frauds and hypocrites. We are great at counting warts and blemishes and weighting feet of clay. In expressing love, we belong among the underdeveloped countries.

Each man has his own batch of poems.