“[I am] someone who represents a very complex country which insists on being simple-minded. And simplicity, it occurs to me, it has occurred to me more than once, in my somewhat stormy life, simplicity is taken to be a great American virtue, along with sincerity. And the result of this is, if you are simple-minded enough, you can become—I didn’t want to go that far [laughs]. And as long as you’re sincere in what you say, you haven’t got to know what you’re talking about. These are the American virtues—two of them anyway. One of the results of this is that immaturity is taken to be a virtue too.”

“[I am] someone who represents a very complex country which insists on being simple-minded. And simplicity, it occurs to me, it has occurred to me more than once, in my somewhat stormy life, simplicity is taken to be a great American virtue, along with sincerity. And the result of this is, if you are simple-minded enough, you can become—I didn’t want to go that far [laughs]. And as long as you’re sincere in what you say, you haven’t got to know what you’re talking about. These are the American virtues—two of them anyway. One of the results of this is that immaturity is taken to be a virtue too.”

“If you know from whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations on where you can go.”

“Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.”

“When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had. It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.”

“You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.”

“But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.”

“The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.”

“An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.”

“We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.”

“I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.”

“We take our shape it is true within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.”