“This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer. ”

“Gatherings and, simultaneously, loneliness are the conditions of a writer's life”

“In order to eat, you have to be hungry. In order to learn, you have to be ignorant. Ignorance is a condition of learning. Pain is a condition of health. Passion is a condition of thought. Death is a condition of life.”

“The Tragedy of the human condition is that the very things that make us interesting and culturally important and progressively brilliant are our differences; and these are also the principle reasons for our prejudices”

“I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.”

“The purpose of history is to explain the present - to say why the world around us is the way it is. History tells us what is important in our world, and how it came to be. It tells us what is to be ignored, or discarded. That is true power - profound power. The power to define a whole society.”