“It’s always best to stay out of other people’s divorces. And their civil wars.”

It is true, as Sartre once wrote, referring to French Army atrocities in Algeria, that the real tragedy in our time is that any of us can be, interchangeably, victim or torturer.

You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right – constitutional right.

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

When I say ‘president,’ I still mean Roosevelt – wisely, I think.

Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia.

I hate nobody.

I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

It is always a delicate matter, when a friend or acquaintance becomes president.

You hear all this whining going on, ‘Where are our great writers?’ The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

I am not, at heart, a playwright.

Anybody who is stupid enough to want to be remembered deserves to be forgotten right now.

We are pleased to dismiss politics as entirely corrupt, if not financially, intellectually.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.

I realized now that militancy in the best sense of the word was the only answer where the black man was concerned, that any black man who wasn’t a militant in 1970 was either blind or a coward.

When I am wrong, I will learn the lesson and move on to face other challenges. For me, that’s what creating your own life is. Doing your best work while being your best self.

The road to the Olympics, leads to no city, no country. It goes far beyond New York or Moscow, ancient Greece or Nazi Germany. The road to the Olympics leads — in the end — to the best within us.

Truth is to act out of the best of ourselves.

I think the best partner you can have is someone who makes you want to be the best form of yourself.

You know your the best when people you don’t know hate you.

I think playing against [Lionel Messi] is pretty difficult. Playing by the side of the best of the world is always good. Things get easier. And if I have to win, may it be by Messi’s side. It would be great.

I want to continue modeling and do the best that I can with that.