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

There is balance in life, but not fairness.

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

Since the moment of the United Nations' inception, untold energies have been expended by governments not only toward the exclusion of persons of principle and distinction from the organization's leading positions, but toward the installation of men whose character and affiliations would as far as possible preclude any serious challenge to governmental sovereignty.

Children seldom have a proper sense of their own tragedy, discounting and keeping hidden the true horrors of their short lives, humbly imagining real calamity to be some prestigious drama of the grown-up world.

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.

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