“The apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and why we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the peop...”

“Webley Edwards was on the radio, they remember that, and what he said that morning again and again was This is an air raid, take cover, this is the real McCoy. That is not a remarkable thing to say...”

“That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither th...”

“Of course the activistsnot those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchichad long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: we ...”

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

“The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justi...”

“Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect”

“In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.”

“But I think that because they trusted themselves and respected themselves as individuals, because they knew beyond doubt that they were valuable and potentially moral units -- because of this they ...”