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.

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.

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

I myself think anti-Semitism is about envy.

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

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.

Courage is nine-tenths context. What is courageous in one setting can be foolhardy in another and even cowardly in a third.