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

Political correctness and so many of the political fashions of the day...could only be perpetrated in adolescent minds: minds, that is, that are trained to search out one thing and one thing only...Only an adolescent would find it worthwhile to devote his or her attention chiefly to the hunting of offenses, the possibility of slights, real and imagined.

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

Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.

While reading writers of great formulatory power — Henry James, Santayana, Proust — I find I can scarcely get through a page without having to stop to record some lapidary sentence. Reading Henry James, for example, I have muttered to myself, "C’mon, Henry, turn down the brilliance a notch, so I can get some reading done." I may be one of a very small number of people who have developed writer’s cramp while reading.

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.

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