Inevitably, the flood of literary pornography loosed on us is dulling our reactions of surprise or shock. Its writers are forced to raise the ante, to provide stronger and stronger stimulants. Or try to provide them, since both the manner, the naming of parts and the few inexpressive four-letter words, and the matter, are narrowly limited.

Perhaps this is in the end what most marriages are - gentleness, memory, and habit.

A politician is forced to make a habit of noble phrases and optimistic lies. In the end they infect himself.

In France, even heresy rapidly hardens into dogma.

From so much of this seriously-intended pornography there rises, even when it is lewdly or boisterously comic, the acrid smell, unmistakable, of self-dislike.

The strangest thing about life is not its frightful cruelty, but that it can be gentle.

each time that I have run away - and from a habit it quickly became an illness - I have betrayed someone. Myself, but not always only myself.