Culture means, I think, that you have widened your experience enough through reading and through being a little bit thoughtful about these things that it has changed your outlook in some ways. And not necessarily made you a better human being but made you see things.

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

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

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

I am married to someone I love.

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.

One serious drawback about letters is that, in order to get them, one must send some out. When it comes to the mail, I feel it is better to receive than to give.