A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke-and that the joke is oneself.

To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our own and are ready to burrow back, back to that private life of the imagination we all led as a child and to whose secret satisfactions so many of us have mislaid the key.

Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.

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

The drinking of wine seems to me to have a moral edge over many pleasures and hobbies in that it promotes love of one's neighbor.

Seriously, I do not know what to say of this book [ Absalom, Absalom!] except that it seem to point to the final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent… this is a penny dreadful tricked up in fancy language and given a specious depth by the expert manipulation of a series of eccentric technical tricks. The characters have no magnitude and no meaning because they have no more reality than a mince-pie nightmare.

Cheese is milk's leap towards immortality.