“Don’t count your boobies until they are hatched.”

Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost.

Discussion in America means dissent.

Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.

Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death… others through sheer inability to cross the street.

The unicorn is a mythical beast.

All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.

A false or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.

The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.

Americans want to go to heaven without dying.

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody’s guess.

If you wonder which is the stronger sex, watch which one twists the other around her little finger.

I myself have known some profoundly thoughtful dogs.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

The act of writing is either something the writer dreads or actually likes, and I actually like it. Even re-writing’s fun. You’re getting somewhere, whether it seems to move or not.

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.

Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.

Unless you count the political backdrop, which in any case is a familiar one to many international readers

You can always count on the New York Times to cut your legs off.

No amount of reading or memorizing will make you successful in life. It is the understanding and application of wise thought which counts.

The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.

The late Nadine Gordimer in South Africa, for example, had a wonderful ability to get her country’s injustices and contradictions down on paper.

I don’t normally vote. I’m lazy and I never bought into the every vote counts.

What counts more than style is whether architecture improves our experience of the built world; whether it makes us wonder why we never noticed places in quite this way before.