Flattery is a challenge. The proper turning away from it, undercutting, diminishing it without offense or vehemence, is a social grace sweeter even than the swift determination to keep ahead in the race of hospitality.

The future may be an enemy. Time can turn happy days and nights into nothing.

Since films and television have staged everything imaginable before it happens, a true event, taking place in the real world, brings to mind the landscape of films.

The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.

Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy.

Here in the city the worst thing that can happen to a nation has happened: we are a people afraid of its youth.