“It is always a delicate matter, when a friend or acquaintance becomes president.”

The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.

The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of ‘Tales from Livy’ that I’d found in my grandfather’s library.

The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.

In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you’re a great writer, you must say that you are.

What I am is something unbearable for the world of journalism and the world of cliches. I’m a realist.

I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.

It is true, as Sartre once wrote, referring to French Army atrocities in Algeria, that the real tragedy in our time is that any of us can be, interchangeably, victim or torturer.

You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right – constitutional right.

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

When I say ‘president,’ I still mean Roosevelt – wisely, I think.

Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia.

I hate nobody.

I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

You hear all this whining going on, ‘Where are our great writers?’ The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?

May I stay soft and delicate in this world meant to draw out the brute in me.

A big heart is both a clunky and a delicate thing; it doesn’t protect itself and it doesn’t hide. It stands out, like a baby’s fontanel, where you can see the soul pulse through.

I miss you a little less each day. You’re just a faded memory now – delicate; tucked away.

Unfolding into yourself, what a tender, delicate thing.

Self Love – the most delicate intimacy.

In a dancer, there is a reverence for such forgotten things as the miracle of the small beautiful bones and their delicate strength.

If you destroy delicacy and a sense of shame in a young girl, you deprave her very fast.

Never do what a specialist can do better. Discover your own specialty. Do not despair if your specialty appears to be more delicate, a lesser thing. Make up in finesse what you lose in force.