The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

...hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.

What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more.

Mozart's music gives us permission to live.

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.