Women who bear children before they establish serious habits of work, may never establish them at all.
There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a dead marriage.
Murky language means someone wants to pick your pocket.
You reach a point in life where you realize that you might as well do what you need to do, because your being loved or not being loved is really a function of the people you encounter and not of yourself. That is an immensely liberating insight.
Conflict is the soul of literature.
There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes.
I do believe that in every age there are people whose consciousness transcends their own time and that these people, whether fictional or historical, are those with whom we most closely identify and those about whom we most enjoy reading.
Isn’t it our job to be appalled by our parents? Isn’t it every generation’s duty to be dismayed by the previous generation? And to assert that we are different – only to discover later that we are distressingly the same?
Perhaps every generation thinks of itself as a lost generation and perhaps every generation is right.
Genius is a strong aphrodisiac.
From Roman times to the present, Italy has been a country to fall in love with – a tribute to all that is enduring, crazy, pagan, joyous, melancholy, at once banal and divine, in the human spirit.
Court, in our society, is often the last resort of stubbornness.
A concern with ‘public morality’ is – if not the last refuge of a scoundrel – the first foray of the fascist.
It is the artists who make the true value of the world, though at times they may have to starve to do it. They are like earthworms, turning up the soil so things can grow, eating dirt so that the rest of us may eat green shoots.
Don’t ye know that ev’ry Soul on Earth feels itself to be an Orphan?
The older we get, the more Jewish we become in my family.
As yet we use our media only for selling things – including, of course, political candidates. What will happen when someone masters the art of selling souls?
Never follow a dog act. You know you’re on the skids when you play yourself in the movie version of your life.
How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful to live with one’s nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right.
It is the nature of those books we call classics to wait patiently on the shelf for us to grow into them.