Perhaps if we lived with less physical beauty we would develop our true natures more.

Did you ever notice how easy it is to forgive a person any number of faults for one endearing characteristic, for a certain style, or some commitment to life - while someone with many good qualities is insupportable for a single defect if it happens to be a boring one?

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.

The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.

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 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.

For most people it's easier to support an eminent person in deserved disgrace than an obscure one who has been wronged.