Great writers are not those who tell us we shouldn’t play with fire, but those who make our fingers burn.

The truth is that our race survived ignorance; it is our scientific genius that will do us in.

We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them.

When you close your eyes to tragedy, you close your eyes to greatness.

The war against Vietnam is only the ghastliest manifestation of what I'd call imperial provincialism, which afflicts America's whole culture-aware only of its own history, insensible to everything which isn't part of the local atmosphere.

Consistency is a virtue for trains.

You tell me your favorite novelists and I'll tell you whom you vote for, or whether you vote at all.