I’m a much worse guest than I am a host, and I’m not an awfully good host either. I really like being alone.
You cannot get through the density of the propaganda with which the American people, through the dreaded media, have been filled and the horrible public educational system we have for the average person. It’s just grotesque.
Love and hate are so confused in your savage minds and the vibrations of the one are so very like those of the other that I can’t always distinguish. You see, we neither love nor hate in my world. We simply have hobbies.
By 1948, the Italians had begun to pull themselves together, demonstrating once more their astonishing ability to cope with disaster which is so perfectly balanced by their absolute inability to deal with success.
I have no television to go on so I get a lot of writing done. That’s my substitute for television.
Who gives a damn about being remembered? That’s really for amateurs.
The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge.
I have never been particularly impressed by the self centered musings of my fellow writers.
Nothing is durable, I think anybody who thinks sex is durable is going to have a lot of grief.
Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.
Art is not a democracy, in fact art is the enemy of democracy.
Nothing that Shakespeare ever invented was to equal Lincoln’s invention of himself and, in the process, us.
Lonely children often have imaginary playmates but I was never lonely; rather, I was solitary, and wanted no company at all other than books and movies, and my own imagination.
One’s neighbor is always the enemy. That is the nature of things.
I went to Europe to live in 1961. I’d never have written Julian if it hadn’t been for the sequestered life that I led in Rome and the classical library at the America Academy.
Most lives are spent putting on and taking off masks.
I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that’s the most important thing there is for middle-class people.
Love, like a sense of humor, is now claimed by everyone even though Love, like a sense of humor, is rather more rare than not, and to most of us poor muddlers unbearable at full strength.
To have an interest in both sexes is equally normal. Whether it’s practiced or not is something else. Some do. Some don’t.
It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.