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

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

I wasn't convinced a shop girl would know the word 'Oedipal.

When people say of their tragedies, 'I don't often think of it now,' what they mean is it has entered permanently into their thoughts, and colors everything.

Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.

Madness might sometimes give access to a kind of knowledge. But was not a guarantee.

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