A perfect conversation would run much less to brilliant sentences than to unfinished ones.

Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.

She ate so many clams that her stomach rose and fell with the tide.

The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.

We are neurotically haunted today by the imminence, and by the ignominy, of failure. We know at how frightening a cost one succeeds: to fail is something too awful to think about.

Once you have money, you can quite truthfully affirm that money isn't everything.

There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.

It is the gossip columnist's business to write about what is none of his business.

True individualists tend to be quite unobservant; it is the snob, the would be sophisticate, the frightened conformist, who keeps a fascinated or worried eye on what is in the wind.

One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame, we have killed off so much real shame as well.

Individualism is rather like innocence: There must be something unconscious about it.

Suffering needs time. It cannot survive in the now.

It is hard to say YES when you cannot say NO. Say NO a lot more. Mean it. Watch how saying YES then becomes easier.

Everyone will be taxed according to his means.

You believe happiness to be derived from the place in which once you have been happy, but in truth it is centered in ourselves.

When people say "the people" or "the public" as though it's the final repository of all morality, I sometimes flinch.

All belief is a cover-up for insecurity

I feel I lost my innocence to cancer.

It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands, Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream, And times and things, as in that vision, seem Keeping along it their eternal stands.

Friends, much as in real life, are often more trouble than their worth.

We are not responsible for finding the right formula to combat or unlock our suffering.