Robert Conquest once suggested that ’a curious little volume might be made of the poems of Stalin, Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh, with illustrations by A. Hitler.
One recalls John Updike’s argument: the only evidence for the existence of God is the collective human yearning that it should be so.
You can kill time in a number of ways but it always depends on the kind of time you’re fighting: some time is unkillable, immortal.
Tremendous interest in the superficial is very characteristic of cultures in decline.
Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.
My life looked good on paper – where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.
People are always talking on their phones, or looking at their phones, because they don’t want to be alone with their thoughts.
Style isn’t something added on; it’s intrinsic to the perceptions and the way you see life.
When communism failed, it wasn’t a good idea that had gone wrong, it was a bad idea that had been sustained with incredible determination in the face of all the commonsense arguments, and at the cost of 20 million lives at least, in Russia, to build the socialist Utopia.
Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are.
Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money.
People look at fame and feel deprived if they haven’t got it, feeling that this is a basic, almost a human right, a civil right. And also feel the same way about wealth, I suppose – why haven’t I got it?
The true manipulator never has a reputation for manipulating.
Screw-top wine has improved the quality of life by about ten percent, wouldn’t you say?
Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.
I think all writers have a bit of genius in them, and a bit of talent. Genius retreats but talent improves.
Envy never comes to the ball dressed as envy; it comes dressed as high moral standards or distaste for materialism.
Your heart becomes gangrenous in your body when you go against your talent.
Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. A religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.
Tennis: the most perfect combination of athleticism, artistry, power, style, and wit. A beautiful game, but one so remorselessly travestied by the passage of time.