Familiarity doesn't breed contempt, it is contempt.

One of life's intriguing paradoxes is that hierarchical social order makes cheap rents and outré artists' colonies possible. Raffish bohemian neighborhoods flourished in the days of racial segregation; under integration the artistic poor have no safe places in which to create.... If America lacks a vigorous culture it is partly because studios and ateliers have become crack houses.

Men are not very good at loving, but they are experts at admiring and respecting; the woman who goes after their admiration and respect will often come out better than she who goes out after their love.

Animal rights activists gives disillusioned feminists an excuse to go back to being women protecting wee creatures without compromising their radical credentials

I cherish the review-as-literature; as lapidary journalism in the eighteenth-century mode, the last hard sparkling diamond in theessayists's tarnished crown. To me, writing a good review is not just a way to make extra money, but a sacred duty.

Each time a mediocre singer performs, he is saying, in effect, "This is good enough for you." The audience, thrust into that familiar American mood of knowing something is wrong but not knowing what it is, unconsciously absorbs the insult and projects it back onto the mediocre performer in the form of inattention, rudeness and noise.

There's something unrefined about a reading woman, they always reek of the lamp. How can she grow up to be a lady if she's always got her nose in a book? Granny Rudin