A perfect conversation would run much less to brilliant sentences than to unfinished ones.

On a very rough-and-ready basis we might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit. Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong.

This is, i think, very much the Age of Anxiety, the age of the neurosis, because along with so much that weighs on our minds there is perhaps even more that grates on our nerves.

One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame, we have killed off so much real shame as well.

Coyness is a rather comically pathetic fault, a miscalculation in which, by trying to veil the ego, we let it appear stark naked.

Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it makes us vain, in fact, of our modesty.

The test of interesting people is that subject matter doesn't matter.