No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.

Men very seldom change, try though we will, beneath the shifts of exterior doctrine, our hearts so often remain what they were.

We are all addicts in various stages of degradation where I live on the Upper West Side, some to heroin, some to small dogs, and some to the New York Times. The heroin is cut, the dogs are paranoid, and the Times cheats by skimping on the West Coast ball scores. No matter, each of us goes upon the street solely in pursuit of his own particular curse.

To be a gentleman is to be oneself, all of a seam, on camera and off.

A revolution requires of its leaders a record of unbroken infallibility; if they do not possess it, they are expected to invent it.

By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.

There is a raging tiger inside every man whom God put on this earth. Every man worthy of the respect of his children spends his life building inside himself a cage to pen that tiger in.