High standards generally – about workmanship and creation of objects, about what is owed in friendship, about the quality of art and much else – far from being snobbish, are required to maintain decency in life.
Envy is never general, but always very particular – at least envy of the kind one feels strongly.
I am married to someone I love.
I think the story is my form.
The best joke-tellers are those who have the patience to wait for conversation to come around to the point where the jokes in their repertoire have application.
No nostalgia runs deeper than that for something one has never known and now cannot obtain.
We do choose how we shall live.
I know from the middle distance I give off the look of being prolific, which is a funny compliment to receive.
The decisive moment in the defeat of upper class, capital-S, Society may have come when, in newspapers all over the nation, what used to be call the Society page was replaced by the Style section.
For me writing is foremost a mode of thinking and when it works well, an act of discovery.
I am not merely a habitual quoter but an incorrigible one. I am, I may as well face it, more quotatious than an old stock-market ticker-tape machine, except that you can’t unplug me.
We who are quotatious are never truly alone, but always hear the cheerful flow of remarks made by dead writers so much more intelligent than we.
I just know so many people who have six or seven foreign languages and have read everything and have musical training and they are still dorks.
My wife who is non-Jewish regrets it all the time that I can say these terrible things about fellow Jews and she can’t.
What distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, and what we do to make them come about.
If geniuses can sometimes make mistakes, cannot the rest of us on occasion be geniuses?
I know how deeply slothful I am.
I know how many days in which I have just answered e-mail, had three phone calls and a two hour lunch. Poof, gone. They are not infrequent.
Within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live.
A writer can get into a vast deal of trouble through misquotation. If you ever want to receive lots of mail, I recommend you get a Shakespeare quote wrong in a magazine or newspaper.
Someone – Cyril Connolly? Ezra Pound? – once said that anything that can be read twice is literature; I would say that anything that bears saying twice is quotable.