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

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

In art, there are tears that do often lie too deep for thoughts.

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

For tens of millions of people [television] has become habit-forming, brain-softening, taste-degrading.

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?

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.