“There are connoisseurs of blue just as there are connoisseurs of wine.”

It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.

If he’s getting married, he’s not longer interesting.

I’ve entered the world of wine without any professional training, but a definite appetite for good bottles.

I have found my voice again and the art of using it.

We only do well the things we like doing.

A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable stock-in-trade with the men.

On this narrow planet, we have only the choice between two unknown worlds. One of them tempts us – ah! what a dream, to live in that! – the other stifles us at the first breath.

Never touch a butterfly’s wing with your finger.

Books, books, books. It was not that I read so much. I read and re-read the same ones. But all of them were necessary to me. Their presence, their smell, the letters of their titles, and the texture of their leather bindings.

One keeps forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave.

As for an authentic villain, the real thing, the absolute, the artist, one rarely meets him even once in a lifetime. The ordinary bad hat is always in part a decent fellow.

The faults of husbands are often caused by the excess virtues of their wives.

Be happy. It’s one way of being wise.

Total absence of humor renders life impossible.

The day after that wedding night I found that a distance of a thousand miles, abyss and discovery and irremediable metamorphosis, separated me from the day before.

The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time.

Congress, just out of the clear blue sky.

It’s not written in the Constitution or anything else….

So my wife’s experience is just like that of anybody else whose husband goes away to a blue collar job and comes home bruised and dirty and often proud of the work that they’re doing.

I’m a doofus from the Valley, a blue-collar guy.

I’d like to be a geneticist to be honest, but there are limits to what I can do now. For my dream to come true I’d have to be 20 years old again, heading off to a blue chip university.

That leaves me with a twisted view of the whole wide world as I know it… And I guess I got no choice but to be a poet.

They asked me, How did you learn to sing the blues like that? How did you learn to sing that heavy? I just opened my mouth and that’s what I sounded like.

People, whether they know it or not, like their blues singers miserable. They like their blues singers to die afterwards.