I've had an unhappy life thank God.

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong.

The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars.

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.

The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.

What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises.

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.

Americans like fat books and thin women.

A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems.

It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.

Anthropology is the science which tells us that people are the same the whole world over - except when they are different.

Authenticity is not an innate quality - that is, you are not born with it. Being an authentic leader is not something you can say about yourself; it must be attributed to you.

Excessive sensibility is only another name for morbid self-consciousness.

Socialism is practical, in the best sense of the term; a living, vital force of inestimable value to society.

You don't dream about angles and surfaces and so on. You dream about women, bread, smokes and trees.

Part of me believes that the completed record is the final measure of a pop musician's accomplishment, just as the completed film is the final measure of a film artist's accomplishments.

Dangerously well’— what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling ‘too well

The truth is, I'm a character guy. That's how I see myself. I always see the role as being far more interesting and important than I am... not all actors approach it that way.

"Have you heard any Stockhausen?" Beecham was asked. "No, but I believe I have stepped in some."

Success means doing the best we can with what we have.