Not to like ice cream is to show oneself uninterested in food.

One of the pleasures of being a Jew, I don't have to tell you, it allows you anti-Semitism.

The problem for me is that reading is, I won't say a sacred, but nevertheless a pretty serious act.

I am the heterosexual Truman Capote.

Not to like ice cream is to show oneself uninterested in food.

While reading writers of great formulatory power — Henry James, Santayana, Proust — I find I can scarcely get through a page without having to stop to record some lapidary sentence. Reading Henry James, for example, I have muttered to myself, "C’mon, Henry, turn down the brilliance a notch, so I can get some reading done." I may be one of a very small number of people who have developed writer’s cramp while reading.

What, really, is wanted from a neighborhood? Convenience, certainly, an absence of major aggravation, to be sure. But perhaps mostof all, ideally, what is wanted is a comfortable background, a breathing space of intermission between the intensities of private life and the calculations of public life.