It is disgusting to pick your teeth; what is vulgar is to use a gold toothpick.

Individualism is rather like innocence: There must be something unconscious about it.

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

Ours is the country where, in order to sell your product, you don't so much point out its merits as you first work like hell to sell yourself.

With intellectuals, moral thought is often less a tonic that quickens ethical action than a narcotic that deadens it.

Temperament, like liberty, is important despite how many crimes are committed in its name.

Today's competitiveness, so much imposed from without, is exhausting, not exhilarating; is unending-a part of one's social life, one's solitude, one's sleep, one's sleeplessness.