On the one side was bigotry, ignorance, hatred, superstition, every sort of blackness that the human mind is capable of. On the other side was sense.

The martini: the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet.

In the United States...politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for King Lear, or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.

Writing does for me what giving milk does for a cow.

There is no record in human history of a happy philosopher: they exist only in romantic legend.

How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.

The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.