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.

In recompense, envy may be the subtlest - perhaps I should say the most insidious - of the seven deadly sins.

I know how many days in which I have just answered e-mail, had three phone calls and a two hour lunch. Poof, gone. They are not infrequent.

The decisive moment in the defeat of upper class, capital-S, Society may have come when, in newspapers all over the nation, what used to be call the Society page was replaced by the Style section.

High standards generally -- about workmanship and creation of objects, about what is owed in friendship, about the quality of art and much else -- far from being snobbish, are required to maintain decency in life.

We use books like mirrors, gazing into them only to discover ourselves.

I just know so many people who have six or seven foreign languages and have read everything and have musical training and they are still dorks