Culture is a way of coping with the world by defining it in detail.
Only the old are innocent. That is what the Victorians understood, and the Christians. Original sin is a property of the young. The old grow beyond corruption very quickly.
Reading someone else’s newspaper is like sleeping with someone else’s wife. Nothing seems to be precisely in the right place, and when you find what you are looking for, it is not clear then how to respond to it.
The better class of Briton likes to send his children away to school until they’re old and intelligent enough to come home again. Then they’re too old and intelligent to want to.
I’ve often thought that my scruples about stealing books were the only thing that stood in the way of my being a really great scholar.
On many American campuses the only qualification for admission was the ability actually to find the campus and then discover a parking space.
I like the English. They have the most rigid code if immorality in the world.
Marriage is the most advanced form of warfare in the modern world.
Life is a crisis – so what!
Most beds aren’t as intimate as people think they are.
But you are involved in the world, and your actions have consequences for other people, and if you don’t recognize that, then that’s the supreme kind of cruelty. Everyone shares someone else’s fate to some extent.
Genitals are a great distraction to scholarship.
You Liberals think that goats are just sheep from broken homes.
To put it another way: a conference is an elite meeting on equal terms; a congress is a group of elites meeting on opposite terms; a convention is a mob meeting on equal terms; a course is an elite instructing a mob; and a colloquium is a group capable of considering all these phenomena.
With my sort of book there’s no resolution, because there’s no solution. The problems aren’t answered in the end because there is no answer. They’re problems that are handed on to the reader, not solved for him so that he can go away thinking he lives in a beautiful world. It’s not a beautiful world.
One is congenitally a woman; one tries not to be, but it’s a question of one’s humanity.
Everywhere there are the politicians and the priest, the ayatollahs and the economists, who will try to explain that reality is what they say it is. Never trust them; trust only the novelist, those deep bankers who spend their time trying to turn pieces of printed paper into value, but never pretend that the result is anything more than a useful fiction.
One thing I have learned, my friend, there is no such thing as the future. The future is just what we invent in the present to put an order over the past.
There are no travellers now, only tourists. A traveller comes to see a reality that is there already. A tourist comes only to see a reality invented for him, in which he conspires.
Unfortunately Marx said that the important thing is not to understand the world but to change it. Poor man, he got it the wrong way round. The important thing is not to change the world too much until you understand it.