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.

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.

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

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

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.

That wine drinking is more effete than beer drinking? No question.

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