Generalization, especially risky generalization, is one of the chief methods by which knowledge proceeds... Safe generalizations are usually rather boring. Delete that "usually rather." Safe generalizations are quite boring.

I myself think anti-Semitism is about envy.

A cat is the only domestic animal I know who toilet trains itself and does a damned impressive job of it.

I am basically a complainer and all the grounds for complaint have been swept out from under me.

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.

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.

No nostalgia runs deeper than that for something one has never known and now cannot obtain.