The biographer’s problem is that he never knows enough. The autobiographer’s problem is that he knows too much.
A railroad station? That was sort of a primitive airport, only you didn’t have to take a cab 20 miles out of town to reach it.
Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.
In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one’s beloved.
Happiness is a small and unworthy goal for something as big and fancy as a whole lifetime, and should be taken in small doses.
Roosevelt’s declaration that Americans had ‘nothing to fear but fear itself’ was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong.
It takes great self-confidence to write a newspaper column. Some might say it takes arrogance. Be that as it may, my willingness to pronounce on a great many matters of which I have little or no knowledge is one of my prime qualifications for this trade.
The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.
Notice, for example, that people who talk about “the joys of childhood” are always adults. Only an adult, utterly remote from the reality of childhood, could suppose it is time of joys.
Industrial-strength foolishness sets in-in males, at least-at about the age of 18. This is why the military prefers males in the 18-to-25-year-old range when there’s combat to be done.
A man doesn’t amount to something because he has been successful at a third-rate career like journalism. It is evidence, that’s all: evidence that if he buckled down and worked hard, he might some day do something really worth doing.
The charm of television entertainment is its ability to bridge the chasm between dinner and bedtime without mental distraction.
Feel good about linking hands in human chain for good causes.
Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O’Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.
Television was the most revolutionary event of the century. Its importance was in a class with the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press, which changed the human condition for centuries afterward.
Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.
Live by publicity, you’ll probably die by publicity.
We all come from the past, and children ought to know what it was that went into their making, to know that life is a braided cord of humanity stretching up from time long gone, and that it cannot be defined by the span of a single journey from diaper to shroud.
You find it so easy to be smart that you don’t bother to work very hard.
One Thanksgiving she burned herself badly when, running up from the cellar over with the ceremonial turkey, she tripped on the stairs and tumbled back down, ending at the bottom in the debris of giblets, hot gravy, and battered turkey. Life was combat, and victory was not to the lazy, the timid, the slugabed, the drugstore cowboy, the libertine, the mushmouth afraid to tell people exactly what was on his mind whether people liked it or not. She ran.
Perhaps humans have always had this ridiculous belief in the absolute excellence of the present, this conviction that the world into which they have had the marvelous good luck to be born is the best world that ever was, the best that ever will be.