“He'll be a minister in Spain some day, or, at the very least, ambassador to Washington, he's exactly the kind of pretentious fool with just a thin veneer of cordiality that the Right produces by the dozen and which the Left reproduces and imitates whenever they're in power, as if they were the victims of some form of contagion.”

“I knew that Sundays in England aren't just ordinary dull Sundays, the same the world over, which demand that one simply tiptoe through without disturbing them or paying them the least attention, they are vaster and slower and more burdensome than anywhere else I know.”

“As a young man, he was already rather pompous and full of himself, concerned with what he would write and with his early (and, later, perennial) hatred of Ireland and the Irish. When he had still written only a few poems, he asked his brother Stanislaus: “Don’t you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying in my poems to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of daily life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own…for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift.” When he was older his comparisons may have been less eucharistic and more modest, but he was always convinced of the extreme importance of his work, even before it existed.”

“The present era is so proud that it has produced a phenomenon which I imagine to be unprecedented: the present's resentment of the past, resentment because the past had the audacity to happen without us being there, without our cautious opinion and our hesitant consent, and even worse, without our gaining any advantage from it.”

“We live, I suppose, in the unconfessed hope that the rules will at some point be broken, along with the normal course of things and custom and history, and that this will happen to us, that we will experience it, that we — that is, I alone — will be the ones to see it. We always aspire, I suppose, to being the chosen ones, and it is unlikely otherwise that we would be prepared to live out the entire course of an entire life, which, however short or long, gradually gets the better of us.”

“We lose everything because everything remains except us. And therefore any form of posterity may be an affront, and perhaps any memory, as well.”

“They had to pretend because our high-ranking politician knew not a word of English (well, when he said goodbye he did risk a “Good luck”) and the high-ranking British politician knew not a word of Spanish (although she did say “Buen dίa” to me as she gave me an iron handshake). So while the former was mumbling gibberish in Spanish, inaudible to cameras and photographers, all the time keeping a broad smile trained on his guest, as if he were regaling her with interesting banter (what he said was not, however, inaudible to me: I seem to remember that he kept repeating “One, two, three, four, five, what a lovely time we’re going to have”). The latter was muttering nonsense in her own language, and smiling even more broadly than him (“Cheese,” she kept saying, which is what all English people being photographed are told to say, and then various untranslatable onomatopoeic words such as “Tweedle tweedle, biddle diddle, twit and fiddle, tweedle twang”).”