Experience teaches you that the man who looks you straight in the eye, particularly if he adds a firm handshake, is hiding something.
— Clifton Fadiman
As between mileage and experience choose experience.
My main recollection is of the work I had to do in order to eat.
A bottle of wine begs to be shared; I have never met a miserly wine lover.
I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.
One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss, but in the number of things they need no longer mention.
The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.
He has made a profession out of a business and an art out of a profession.
Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly.
Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.
I tried to use the questions and answers as an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversation.
To feel at home, stay at home.
Cheese is milk's leap toward immortality.
When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.
To take wine into our mouths is to savor a droplet of the river of human history.
For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.
The German mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest.
By the end of high school I was not of course an educated man, but I knew how to try to become one.
Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.
There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.
A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.
A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke - and that the joke is oneself.
My son is 7 years old. I am 54. It has taken me a great many years to reach that age. I am more respected in the community, I am stronger, I am more intelligent and I think I am better than he is. I don't want to be a pal, I want to be a father.
When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.
