“You can read Kant by yourself, if you wanted to; but you must share a joke with someone else.”

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

Talk is by far the most accessible of pleasures.

To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.

It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.

Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind, spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.

Even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.

Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism.

We must accept life for what it actually is – a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature.

Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.

The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.

Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.

No man is useless while he has a friend.

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.

We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.

I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.

Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.

Singing is about telling a story. When you are onstage, you get to be your own self… When acting, you’re someone else.

I’ve always been interested in jobs in the NBA. But I’ve been in this for 20 years and it might be time to do something else.

Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else.

In the closing seconds of every game, I want the ball in my hands for the last shot – not in anybody else’s, not in anybody else’s in the world.

You have to be compelled to write. If you’re not, nothing else that you do matters.

“What if I like watching television? What if I don’t want to do much else other than read a book?”.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.