Intellectuals are people who believe that ideas are of more importance than values. That is to say, their own ideas and other people's values.

Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden death.

Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself.

Those who have money think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know it is money.

Wisdom is keeping a sense of fallibility of all our views and opinions.

We are closer to the ants than to the butterflies. Very few people can endure much leisure.

In a happy marriage it is the wife who provides the climate, the husband the landscape.

We confess our bad qualities to others out of fear of appearing naive or ridiculous by not being aware of them.

Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned.

The only test of work of literature is that it shall please other ages than its own.

Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals, and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.

All they want is to point a finger.

It’s truly interesting to observe how genetics works in families, and what a huge lottery it is to inherit some of our relatives’ appearance features.

Consider Ireland.... You have a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church, and in addition the weakest executive in the world. That is the Irish Question.

I'm an African-American writer, I'm a lazy writer, I'm a writer who likes to watch The Wire, I'm a writer who likes to eat a lot of steak.

I don't know a greater advantage, than to appreciate the worth of an enemy.

I find shoestrings very hard work. I like big budgets.

Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we'd be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the forest?

Sometimes when people have kids young, they're not ready.

Listen, were losing so much manufacturing, all over the United States.

New York City is one of the most vulnerable cities in the world to climate change, so I see Keystone as the central threat to New York.