“Many contemporary authors drink more than they write.”

Let us not search for the guilty ones only among others, let us speak the bitter truth: we are all guilty each and every one of us.

In the carriages of the past, you can’t go anywhere.

Lies are the religion of slaves and masters. Truth is the god of the free man.

Everywhere, within man and without, there is devastation, instability, chaos, and evidence of some prolonged rout.

Processing the human raw material is naturally more complicated than processing lumber.

In war it is necessary to kill as many people as possible — such is the cynical logic of war. Brutality in a fight is unavoidable; have you seen how cruelly children fight in the streets?

In the maxim of the past you cannot go anywhere.

Be good, be kind, be humane, and charitable; love your fellows; console the afflicted; pardon those who have done you wrong.

Only mothers can think of the future – because they give birth to it in their children.

One has to be able to count if only so that at fifty one doesn’t marry a girl of twenty.

Even a bad man is better than a good book.

There is no one on earth more disgusting and repulsive than he who gives alms. Even as there is no one so miserable as he who accepts them.

The good qualities in our soul are most successfully and forcefully awakened by the power of art. Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul.

You will not drown the truth in seas of blood.

Keep reading books, but remember that a book’s only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself.

Every new time will give its law.

Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass “conceptualism” that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context.

There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular – though profoundly mistaken – definition of myth as falsehood.

Honestly, I haven’t the time to read contemporary writers. I know this is awful, but in the main it is true.

I don’t think they [contemporary writers] read me either. I mean, if we’re concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work.

Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.

Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, ‘Well, so-and-so will like this,’ which you do when you’re younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.

Catchphrases flourish in contemporary American English.

As long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not.