Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they've taken as their own, as their representative American someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.

If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.

I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language - always the language - was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry.

The stupider the regime the more intelligent the people get and the more humorous.

If you can charm everyone it means you don't care about anyone in particular.

The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed—but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one.

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.