Today's competitiveness, so much imposed from without, is exhausting, not exhilarating; is unending-a part of one's social life, one's solitude, one's sleep, one's sleeplessness.

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.

You don't always need to know your destination when you set out on a journey.

You don't ask nobody to give what they can't give, or be what they can't be. You've learnt that, you got a headstart on heartbreak.

...what draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on the way.

The exceptionalism of a black U.S. President is not important to me. It's what he does - and who he has at the table.

I don’t like it when you use my shampoo, because then your hair smells like me, not you.

Let no man fear to die, we love to sleep all, and death is but the sounder sleep.

The person who properly disciplines himself to do those things that he does not especially care to do, becomes successful.

I don't do what you people want. I Do What I Want!

It's downright undignified how many blazers I've bought over the years. And will continue to buy. They immediately give shape and add authority. With the perfect blazer, anything is possible.

I find that anything culturally significant that happened before '93 I associate with the decade before it. In fact, Oregon Trail is one of a handful of signposts that middle school existed at all.