Once you are thought selfish, not only are you forgiven a life designed mainly to suit yourself, which in anyone else would appear monstrous, but if an impulse to generosity should by chance overpower you, you will get five times the credit of some poor selfless soul who has been oozing kindness for years.

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.

A dog is the only exercise machine you cannot decide to skip when you don't feel like it.

Upon becoming fifty the one thing you can't afford is habit.

A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.

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

In former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy; today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt.