When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.

To feel at home, stay at home.

One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss, but in the number of things they need no longer mention.

For most men, life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

I tried to use the questions and answers as an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversation.

Reading to small children is a specialty.

Miss Stein was a past master in making nothing happen very slowly

For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.

He has made a profession out of a business and an art out of a profession.

Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.

Cheese is milk’s leap towards immortality

My son is 7 years old. I am 54. It has taken me a great many years to reach that age. I am more respected in the community, I am stronger, I am more intelligent...

My main recollection is of the work I had to do in order to eat.

The tantrums of cloth-headed celluloid idols are deemed fit for grown-up conversation, while silence settles over such a truly important matter as food.

By the end of high school I was not an educated man, but I knew how to try to become one.

By the end of high school I was not of course an educated man, but I knew how to try to become one.

As between mileage and experience choose experience.

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.

Cheese is milk’s leap towards immortality.

To take wine into our mouths is to savor a droplet of the river of human history.

When you read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in YOU than there was before.

Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.

A bottle of wine begs to be shared; I have never met a miserly wine lover.

Cheese — milk’s leap forward to immortality.

A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke – and that the joke is oneself.

I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.

To divide one’s life by years is of course to tumble into a trap set by our own arithmetic. The calendar consents to carry on its dull wall-existence by the arbitrary timetables we have drawn...

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.

Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly.

The mama of dada

Experience teaches you that the man who looks you straight in the eye, particularly if he adds a firm handshake, is hiding something.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Don’t be afraid of poetry.

Cheese – milk’s leap toward immortality.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

The German mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest.

The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.

We prefer to believe that the absence of inverted commas guarantees the originality of a thought, whereas it may be merely that the utterer has forgotten its source.