Nobody can misunderstand a child as much as his own parents.

The main discomfort in being a middle-of-the-roader is that you get sideswiped by partisans going in both directions.

Elitism is the slur directed at merit by mediocrity.

Life is, if anything, the art of combination. Of discrimination. Of freely picking one's own personal pattern out of a hundred choices. Not letting it be picked for you—either by the Establishment, or by the Rebels. Conformity of Hip is no better than Conformity of Square.

Norbert Blei is a writer the way people used to be troubadours and minstrels, celebrating what he has seen and heart and felt in a deceptively simple style reminiscent of the early Sherwood Anderson. . . . Like Anderson, he is a lover, and his affection invests his writing with a singular charm.

The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, but false progress.

If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?