What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.

There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.

I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.

When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way your writing has been used.

This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.

His view of time, and of change, has become that of most elderly people: he hates change, since for him - for his body - any change is for the worse. And if there is to be change, then he wants it to happen quickly, so it does not use up too much of the time remaining to him.