Nothing creates such untruth in you as the wish to please.

I have a superstition that if I talk about plot, it's like letting sand out of a hole in the bottom of a bag.

Italians are never punctual; the café, the convenient place to wait, absolves them from that. There is no question of hanging about, no looking lost and unwanted or even disreputable, as there is in hotel lobbies or the foyers of restaurants. One just sits and enjoys the scene, and waits.

The sweetness that all longed for night and day. Some tragedy might be idly guessed at-loss or illness. She had the luminosity of those about to die.

I think that one is constantly startled by the things that appear before you on the page when you're writing.

It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.

The United Nations emerged as a temple of official good intentions, a place where governments might - without abating their transgressions - go to church; a place made remote - by agreed untruth and procedural complexity, and by tedium itself - from the risk of intense public involvement.