The American Way is so restlessly creative as to be essentially destructive; the American Way is to carry common sense itself almost to the point of madness.

She ate so many clams that her stomach rose and fell with the tide.

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

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

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.

Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.

Has there ever been an age so rife with neurotic sensibility, with that state of near shudders, or near hysteria, or near nausea, much of it induced by trifles, which used to belong to people who were at once ill-adjusted and over-civilized?