Envy is never general, but always very particular - at least envy of the kind one feels strongly.

The best joke-tellers are those who have the patience to wait for conversation to come around to the point where the jokes in their repertoire have application.

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

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

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 was recently asked what it takes to become a writer. Three things, I answered: first, one must cultivate incompetence at almost every other form of profitable work. This must be accompanied, second, by a haughty contempt for all the forms of work that one has established one cannot do. To these two must be joined, third, the nuttiness to believe that other people can be made to care about your opinions and views and be charmed by the way you state them. Incompetence, contempt, lunacy—once you have these in place, you are set to go.

One of the pleasures of being a Jew, I don't have to tell you, it allows you anti-Semitism.