In my firm, we dealt in lies. Advertising is that ... the skilful use of the truth to mislead, to spoil, to debase.

There is as much vanity in self-scourgings as in self-justification.

I do not think about absent persons as often or with such intense longing as I think of places. They lie one below the other in my mind.

To reject censorship after studying the risks involved is very well. To reject it ex cathedra, in the tones of Calvin pronouncing a dogma, eyes and mind closed to the possible consequences, the even marginally possible, is to make things too comfortable for oneself.

An animal is not cruel; it lives wholly in the instant leap on its prey, in the present taste of marrow or blood. Cruelty begins with the memory, and the pleasures of the memory are impure; they draw their strength along levels where no sun has reached.

The gesture with which one generation guards the next is the movement, and the only time we see it clearly, of life itself.

If you think with enough energy about a hoped-for event, it will in the end happen. Not because you willed it. Because it was all the time in your nature.