Power is the ability to take one's place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one's part matter.

Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.

Quoting, like smoking, is a dirty habit to which I am devoted.

Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.

One hires lawyers as on hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one's hands off the beastly drains.

Cynic' is the sentimentalist's name for the realist.

The rare, delicate flavor of a life after retiring in one's sixties, whatever one has "retired" from, the pleasure I experienced beyond my job at Columbia, is a gift of life in the last decades. but it is not easily learned. . . . But sometimes, the only way to live is to get out, or at least seriously to contemplate getting out, doing the impossible,flinging the conventional tea.