Longing, the hope for fulfillment, is the one unwavering passion of the world's commerce.

Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.

The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people s suffering for his principles.

The voice of the Constitution is the inescapably solemn self-consciousness of the people giving the law unto themselves.

Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.

A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.

It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.

All over the world today, not just in the totalitarian countries, assiduous functionaries in Ministries of Truth are clubbing history dumb and rendering language insensible.

I lived in New York for a couple months. It seemed to me at first an incredibly clean place with well-dressed people and washed cars and bright-painted red-and-yellow streetcars and white buildings.

We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.