That was the trouble with experience; it taught you that most people were capable of anything, so that loyalty was never quite on firm ground -- or, rather, became a matter of pardoning offenses instead of denying their existence.

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

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.

Human beings need unhappiness at least as much as they need happiness.

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

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.

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.