Travel in foreign lands breaks speech habits and makes you blab less, and breaks the habitual space-feeling because of different village plans and landscapes. It's less important that there are different mores, for you counteract these with your own..."

Comedy deflates the sense precisely so that the underlying lubricity and malice may bubble to the surface.

All men are creative but few are artists.

"To translate, one must have a style of his own, for otherwise the translation will have no rhythm or nuance, which come from the process of artistically thinking through and molding the sentences . . ."

"It rarely adds anything to say, "In my opinion" -- not even modesty. Naturally a sentence is only your opinion; and you are not the Pope."