Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.

What you fear most will happen to you - that is the law.

It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.

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.

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

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.

Marriage is like democracy - it doesn't really work, but it's all we've been able to come up with.