“The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has — I’m not kidding.”

I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

Listen, if you’re not going to be a nun or something, you might as well laugh.

Grand. There’s a word I really hate. It’s a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.

We don’t talk, we hold forth. We don’t converse, we expound.

I have scars on my hands from touching certain people…Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me.

If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she’s late? Nobody.

It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.

You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.

I’m up to my ears in unwritten words.

I hate actors. They never act like people. They just think they do.

I mean they don’t seem able to love us just the way we are. They don’t seem able to love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more.

We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.

How long should a man’s legs be? Long enough to touch the ground.

The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.

I’m one of the little foxes that spoil the grapes.

I’m quite illiterate, but I read a lot.

The only geniuses produced by the chaos of society are those who do something about it. Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.

We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.

Indeed one of the ultimate advantages of an education is simply coming to the end of it.

It has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student’s life.

I was an art history major, but never specifically contemporary. I would say where I really stopped were the abstract expressionists in the New York school.

The problem of far greater importance remains to be solved. Rather than build a world in which we shall all live well, we must stop building one in which it will be impossible to live at all.

The only useful thing I ever learned in school was that if you spit on your eraser it erased ink.

No one asks how to motivate a baby. A baby naturally explores everything it can get at, unless restraining forces have already been at work. And this tendency doesn’t die out, it’s wiped out.