The best joke-tellers are those who have the patience to wait for conversation to come around to the point where the jokes in their repertoire have application.

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

What all great teachers appear to have in common is love of their subject, an obvious satisfaction in rousing this love in their students, and an ability to convince them that what they are being taught is deadly serious

A writer can get into a vast deal of trouble through misquotation. If you ever want to receive lots of mail, I recommend you get a Shakespeare quote wrong in a magazine or newspaper.

Always seek the general and never quite trust it.

Someone — Cyril Connolly? Ezra Pound? — once said that anything that can be read twice is literature; I would say that anything that bears saying twice is quotable.

Envy is never general, but always very particular - at least envy of the kind one feels strongly.