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

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

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 am not merely a habitual quoter but an incorrigible one. I am, I may as well face it, more quotatious than an old stock-market ticker-tape machine, except that you can't unplug me.

By the way, the secret of speaking French is confidence. Whether you are right or wrong, you don't hesitate.

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

I know how many days in which I have just answered e-mail, had three phone calls and a two hour lunch. Poof, gone. They are not infrequent.