Always seek the general and never quite trust it.

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.

Culture means, I think, that you have widened your experience enough through reading and through being a little bit thoughtful about these things that it has changed your outlook in some ways. And not necessarily made you a better human being but made you see things.

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

I am afraid I am one of those people who continues to read in the hope of sometime discovering in a book a single—and singular—piece of wisdom so penetrating, so soul stirring, so utterly applicable to my own life as to make all the bad books I have read seem well worth the countless hours spent on them. My guess is that this wisdom, if it ever arrives, will do so in the form of a generalization.

I know from the middle distance I give off the look of being prolific, which is a funny compliment to receive.

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.