Highly educated bores are by far the worst; they know so much, in such fiendish detail, to be boring about.

In general, American social life constitutes an evasion of talking to people. Most Americans don't, in any vital sense, get together; they only do things together.

It is one of the sublime provincialities of New York that its inhabitants lap up trivial gossip about essential nobodies they've never set eyes on, while continuing to boast that they could live somewhere for twenty years without so much as exchanging pleasantries with their neighbors across the hall.

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

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.

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

The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.