Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it’s a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Life – and I don’t suppose I’m the first to make this comparison – is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

And there never was an apple, in Adam’s opinion, that wasn’t worth the trouble you got into for eating it.

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one’s self to do without it.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

I don’t know if proud is the right word, but I am somebody who does not, on the whole, have the highest regard for my own stuff in that when I look all I get...

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

Consequences are unpitying.

I have no academic qualifications whatsoever.

Partly because I get such astonishingly nice fans.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that as soon as one part of your life starts looking up, another falls to pieces.

People who can’t be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.

A nice, easy place for freedom of speech to be eroded is comics, because comics are a natural target whenever an election comes up.

I’m proof against that word failure. I’ve seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.

I loved writing a book in which, in some ways, it’s very, very classical, and in some ways I’m breaking lots of rules about what you can do and what you can’t do.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

If a nation wants to live in peace with its neighbors, it doesn’t keep rattling the saber at them.

Rock and roll stars have it much better than writers when they’re on a tour.

Dieting on New Year’s Day isn’t a good idea as you can’t eat rationally but really need to be free to consume whatever is necessary, moment by moment, in order to ease your hangover. I...

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

We all not only could know everything. We do. We just tell ourselves we don’t to make it all bearable.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.