I don’t like the kind of country living where you have to help. I like country living where there is help.
Not writing is probably the most exhausting profession I’ve ever encountered. It takes it out of you. It’s very psychically wearing not to write – I mean if you’re supposed to be writing.
Any artist who has that quality of timelessness has that quality because they tell the truth.
I hate, simply, to work. I just hate to work, period. I am profoundly slothful. Practically inert.
In Rome people spend most of their time having lunch. And they do it very well – Rome is unquestionably the lunch capital of the world.
Being poor is like being a child. Being rich is like being an adult: you get to do whatever you want. Everyone is nice when they have to be; rich people are nice when they feel like it.
I always make a big effort to make a distinction between what is actually worse or what is just worse about not being 21. Of course, it’s much worse not to be 21. This is a given. But there are things that are worse.
Perhaps the least cheering statement ever made on the subject of art is that life imitates it.
I’m like the laziest person who ever lived. It’s amazing to me I even sit up.
In fact, we live in a culture where intelligence, exceptional or not, is reviled.
People have been cooking and eating for thousands of years, so if you are the very first to have thought of adding fresh lime juice to scalloped potatoes try to understand that there must be a reason for this.
A great many people in Los Angeles are on special diets that restrict their intake of synthetic foods. The reason for this appears to be a widely held belief that organically grown fruits and vegetables make the cocaine work faster.
The Italians are the most civilized people. And they’re very warm. Basically, they’re Jews with great architecture.
Albert Einstein didn’t care where he lived. Albert Einstein was a genius. Albert Einstein wasn’t getting lost in the master bedroom, he was lost in thought.
People elect the President for reasons that have nothing to do with his ability to be president.
Notoriously insensitive to subtle shifts in mood, children will persist in discussing the color of a recently sighted cement-mixer long after one’s own interest in the topic has waned.
A dog who thinks he is a man’s best friend is a dog who obviously has never met a tax lawyer.
American women think that clothes fit them if they can fit into them. But that’s not at all what fit means.
The main symptom of falling in love is that you lose your intellectual prowess.
A community is a butcher and a doctor, a minister, a town troublemaker. A “community” is not a bunch of people united by some grievance. That’s just self-righteousness – incredibly dangerous and antidemocratic.