You cannot be both fashionable and first-rate

The test of enjoyment is the remembrance which it leaves behind.

There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.

When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.

Don't tell friends their social faults; they will cure the fault and never forgive you.

The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the blood.

Eat with the rich, but go to the play with the poor, who are capable of joy.

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to a vulgar taste.

What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.

Style is a magic wand, and turns everything to gold that it touches.

A noble journey through the travails of time calls for a person to disregard conventional social, cultural, and moral contexts and strive to cleave a personal meaning that guides their existence.

Without new ideas success can become stale

I'd like a glass of cold gravy with a hair in it, please.

The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.

I'll always be Alice Toklas if you'll be Gertrude Stein.

I contracted a disease which I have never shaken off. The disease was idealism. Because of it, I did the thing in life I wanted to do - Writing.

It is true that I have known Straussians almost all my life. And the one thing I was taught about them from the earliest age is that they are wrong.

I don't think DIY is something that necessarily comes to mind when people hear Third Eye Blind, but that is completely how we've been from the beginning.

False notes [on the piano] are human. Why does everything have to be perfect? You know, perfection itself is imperfection.

'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth