Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.

It's true, you can never eat a pet you name. And anyway, it would be like a ventriloquist eating his dummy.

There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.

September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.

Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?" asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends," says I, "how much you used the dictionary before you read it.

I hate injustice, I despise inequity, I condemn hypocrisy, I abhor the lack of reason.

Where there is no style, there is in effect no point of view. There is, essentially, no anger, no conviction, no self. Style is opinion, hung washing, the caliber of a bullet, teething beads.

Why should a blacksmith put his hands in the fire if he has tongs?

Yellow is vagueness and luminousness, both.

One's style holds one, thankfully, at bay from the enemies of it but not from the stupid crucifixions by those who must willfully misunderstand it.

Nothing is quite as bad as being without privacy and lonely at the same time.

I've never understood the desire for books with matched bindings. You don't go through life looking for sets of matched people, and books are just as individual.

...American psychology effectively guaranteed its place as a cultural icon by helping to create the pathologies it simultaneously promised to treat. (p. 37)

The best mind-altering drug is the truth.

I've been lucky enough to be part of some great ensembles in theater - I'd been doing theater since college.

Death has been here and where death has been no light shall ever be .

Every time someone says, 'You know, we really ought to get together,' if I were really honest, I would ask 'Why?'

I always find it much easier when there's one person whose vision you're following, as opposed to many people.

Inequality of any kind, once considered a normal, natural part of human existence, came to be seen in the course of the twentieth century as increasingly illegitimate.

Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.

Give me a bowl of wine. I have not that alacrity of spirit Nor cheer of mind that I was wont to have.