The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.

Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind; it is a way of engaging reality.

One great flaw in the reforming passion is that in its eagerness to remedy social wrongs it tends to neglect, certainly to undervalue, the experience of those whose lives it wishes to improve.

Taste speaks through a turn of phrase, a curl of the lip, a shrug of the shoulder: it makes an atmosphere.

Comedy speaks for civilization; farce bears an ill-concealed, sometimes unconcealed animus against civilization. Often against civility too.

Good readers make much out of little.

The cruelest thing anyone can do to Portnoy's Complaint is to read it twice.

The message of guidance that neither politics nor philosophy nor religion now seems able to provide, we look for in modern literature.

No one has ever seen the self. It has no visible shape, nor does it occupy measurable space. It is an abstraction, like other abstractions equally elusive: the individual, the mind, the society

He claimed his modest share of the general foolishness of the human race.

The cause of most of man's unhappiness is sacrificing what he wants most for what he wants now.

A man and woman in search of something are always blown apart, but it's the same wind that blows them.

How lovely to think that no one need wait a moment, we can start now, start slowly changing the world!

I think it's true that the more sanitized a person is, you can't really relate to that person.

I believe poor people are good people, except the ones that are mean . . .

Blessed is he who has a soul, blessed is he who has none, but woe and grief to him who has it in embryo.

On Wall Street, there is no "Wall Street"; there are individuals.

Make America great again is not just some slogan. It is what has been in his heart since the day I met Donald Trump.

It is not enough to give money for demonstration projects. From the very beginning plans should be made for the scaling-up of successful innovations.

Dont forget, I was the soft, pudgy kid in school that everyone made fun of.