I don't like making pacts with tomorrow. I want today — just as it is, good and bad. I feel safe that way. I don't want to face the great perhaps. - Morris West

[The writer] has to be the kind of man who turns the world upside down and says, lookit, it looks different, doesn’t it?

A nadie — contestó Rossini — . Todos llevamos demasiada historia a nuestras espaldas, y la historia modifica todo lo que hacemos o decimos. El Santo Padre viajó a París para saludar a los jóvenes. Grandiosas manifestaciones,

They're a migratory tribe, so you find them everywhere […] They're hardy, longevitous, resistant to infection by disease or new ideas, little modified by regional influences. The accent drifts a bit, maybe. The dialect adapts itself to the local patois: but that's a chameleon's trick: protective colouring, no more. The rest of it, the sinuous mind, the easy passion, the leery eye, the ready smile, the fine, swaggering, billycock-and-shillelagh walk, the flexible moralities, the bel canto oratory, the black bilious angers, these never change.