Television turned out to be exactly as bad as the most irritating and pedantic intellectuals of the '50s said it was going to be.

If people don't hold grudges, it means they just don't care what people do.

Technological innovation has done great damage ... to eating habits. Food is now available in such unpleasant forms that one frequently finds smoking between courses to be an aid to digestion.

The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat.

In New York we have zillions of different kinds of people, many of them hate each other, but violence based on that hatred is really uncommon here.

When I was very little, say five or six, I became aware of the fact that people wrote books. Before that, I thought that God wrote books. I thought a book was a manifestation of nature, like a tree.

Magazines all too frequently lead to books and should be regarded by the prudent as the heavy petting of literature.