The main obligation is to amuse yourself.

I found the pearl of the Orient slightly less exciting than a rainy Sunday evening in Rochester.

"In France," Marcel said with wintry dignity, "accidents occur in the bedroom, not the kitchen."

I tried to resist his overtures, but he plied me with symphonies, quartets, chamber music, and cantatas.

Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin - it's the triumphant twang of a bedspring.

Fate was dealing from the bottom of the deck.

There are nineteen words in Yiddish that convey gradations of disparagement, from a mild, fluttery helplessness to a state of downright, irreconcilable brutishness. All of them can be usefully employed to pinpoint the kind of individuals I write about.