I suppose it’s because beer is connected to football broadcasts and the rest of it. Beer . . . accompanies male activities.

I am basically a complainer and all the grounds for complaint have been swept out from under me.

Envy is never general, but always very particular – at least envy of the kind one feels strongly.

I am married to someone I love.

I know from the middle distance I give off the look of being prolific, which is a funny compliment to receive.

I am the heterosexual Truman Capote.

I know how deeply slothful I am.

Conservatives and those on the right are usually willing to settle for thinking themselves correct on political issues; those on the left have always needed to feel not so much that they are correct but...

I just know so many people who have six or seven foreign languages and have read everything and have musical training and they are still dorks.

I know how many days in which I have just answered e-mail, had three phone calls and a two hour lunch. Poof, gone. They are not infrequent.

[Snobbishness] is the desire for what divides men and the inability to value what unites them.

My wife who is non-Jewish regrets it all the time that I can say these terrible things about fellow Jews and she can’t.

I myself think anti-Semitism is about envy.

We do not choose to be born…We do not–most of us, choose to die, or the times or conditions of our death. But within all this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we shall...

No one has really ever defined what a friend is.

I should prefer to die laughing, and, on more than one occasion, thought I might.

If superior talk is your idea of a good time it’s (hell) not really such a bad place to end up

Not to like ice cream is to show oneself uninterested in food.

I think the story is my form.

That wine drinking is more effete than beer drinking? No question,

Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.

In recompense, envy may be the subtlest – perhaps I should say the most insidious – of the seven deadly sins.

The decisive moment in the defeat of upper class, capital-S, Society may have come when, in newspapers all over the nation, what used to be call the Society page was replaced by the Style section.

One of the pleasures of being a Jew, I don’t have to tell you, it allows you anti-Semitism.

The pleasure of jogging and running is rather like that of wearing a fur coat in Texas in August: the true joy comes in being able to take the damn thing off.

By the way, the secret of speaking French is confidence. Whether you are right or wrong, you don’t hesitate.

One serious drawback about letters is that, in order to get them, one must send some out. When it comes to the mail, I feel it is better to receive than to give.

We know the ideal isn’t where the action is.

Culture means, I think, that you have widened your experience enough through reading and through being a little bit thoughtful about these things that it has changed your outlook in some ways. And not necessarily...