I like to walk around Manhattan, catching glimpses of its wild life, the pigeons and cats and girls.

I understand the technique of eccentricity; it would be futile for a man to labor at establishing a reputation for oddity if he were ready at the slightest provocation to revert to normal action.

A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.

If I'm home with no chore at hand, and a package of books has come, the television set and the chess board and the unanswered mail will have to manage without me if one of the books is a detective story.

[A] pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant.

Subtlety chases the obvious up a never-ending spiral and never quite catches it.

What do I believe in? Belief means faith, and there's only one damned thing in the world I have any faith in. That's the idea of American democracy, because it seems to me so obvious that that's the only sensible way to run human affairs.