Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.
Home is one's birthplace, ratified by memory.
Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault
Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air.
Home is the wallpaper above the bed, the family dinner table, the church bells in the morning, the bruised shins of the playground, the small fears that come with dusk, the streets and squares and monuments and shops that constitute one's first universe.
Everything can be learned, including, to a very large extent, to be what you are not. You can learn to be pretty if you are plain, charming if you are dull, thin if you are fat, youthful if you are aging, how to write though you are inarticulate, how to make money though you are not good with figures.
Libel actions, when we look at them in perspective, are an ornament of a civilized society. They have replaced, after all, at least in most cases, a resort to weapons in defense of a reputation.
. . . I loved to dance in studios, but not necessarily on stage. What I loved was to sweat and to feel every single pore open up
You don't have body parts there do you?" my mother interrupted. "I don't want to open the fridge and find a head on the shelf" Rodney laughed. "No Justina, it doesn't look like Jeffrey Dahmer's hideaway.
Association with my pupils has kept me young in my work. Criticism of their work has kept my own point of view clear.
At war with savages and idiots. To be a Frenchman abroad is to be miserable; to be an American abroad is to make others miserable.