To take wine into your mouth is to savor a droplet of the river of human history.

The tantrums of cloth-headed celluloid idols are deemed fit for grown-up conversation, while silence settles over such a truly important matter as food.

Name me any liquid — except our own blood — that flows more intimately and incessantly through the labyrinth of symbols we have conceived to mark our status as human beings, from the rudest peasant festival to the mystery of the Eucharist.

The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.

What is a sense of humor? Surely not the ability to understand a joke. It comes rather from a residing feeling of one's own absurdity. It is the ability to understand a joke, and that the joke is on oneself.

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.

Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.