We who are quotatious are never truly alone, but always hear the cheerful flow of remarks made by dead writers so much more intelligent than we.

Many moons ago dictionaries of quotations may have been less needed than they are today. In those good/bad old days, people walked around with entire poems and all the Shakespearean soliloquies in their heads.

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

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

I have myself always been terrified of plagiarism - of being accused of it, that is. Every writer is a thief, though some of us are more clever than others at disguising our robberies. The reason writers are such slow readers is that we are ceaselessly searching for things we can steal and then pass off as our own: a natty bit of syntax, a seamless transition, a metaphor that jumps to its target like an arrow shot from an aluminum crossbow.

The decisive moment in the defeat of upper class, capital-S, Society may have come when, in newspapers all over the nation, what used to be call the Society page was replaced by the Style section.

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.