I write because I'm a writer. It is rather like cooking: to make something out of the raw material at hand.

public opinion, the sum of private opinions, does matter, can matter often for good.

One does odd things. You see, when one's young one doesn't feel part of it yet, the human condition; one does things because they are not “for good”; one thinks everything is a rehearsal - to be repeated ad lib, to be put right when the curtain goes up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That was the performance.

All wealth is relative; and so is its absence.

The future of human society. Had it made an irrevocably false start? The compass error that gets harder to correct with every mile you go?

In Europe, where human relations like clothes are supposed to last, one's got to be wearable. In France one has to be interesting, in Italy pleasant, in England one has to fit.

All food is the gift of the gods and has something of the miraculous, the egg no less than the truffle.