I should prefer to die laughing, and, on more than one occasion, thought I might.

A writer can get into a vast deal of trouble through misquotation. If you ever want to receive lots of mail, I recommend you get a Shakespeare quote wrong in a magazine or newspaper.

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

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.

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

All men and women are born, live, suffer and die; what distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, whether they be dreams about worldly or unworldly things, and what we do to make them come about... We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time and conditions of our death. But within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live.

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.