I am the heterosexual Truman Capote.

I believe it was Gayelord Hauser, the nutritionist, who said, 'You are what you eat,' but if you happen to be an intellectual, you are what you quote.

What distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, and what we do to make them come about.

If geniuses can sometimes make mistakes, cannot the rest of us on occasion be geniuses?

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.

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.

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.