The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.

There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.

irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.