Comedy speaks for civilization; farce bears an ill-concealed, sometimes unconcealed animus against civilization. Often against civility too.

Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind; it is a way of engaging reality.

The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.

One great flaw in the reforming passion is that in its eagerness to remedy social wrongs it tends to neglect, certainly to undervalue, the experience of those whose lives it wishes to improve.

Taste speaks through a turn of phrase, a curl of the lip, a shrug of the shoulder: it makes an atmosphere.

Good readers make much out of little.

The cruelest thing anyone can do to Portnoy's Complaint is to read it twice.

The message of guidance that neither politics nor philosophy nor religion now seems able to provide, we look for in modern literature.

No one has ever seen the self. It has no visible shape, nor does it occupy measurable space. It is an abstraction, like other abstractions equally elusive: the individual, the mind, the society

He claimed his modest share of the general foolishness of the human race.

If someone is really close with you, your getting upset or them getting upset is okay, and they don’t change because of it. It’s just part of the relationship. It happens. You deal with it.

Any creature, even one as unassuming as a fish, can become something mighty. When they courageously endure their trials, they meet their destiny.

May I remind you, I am half Demon and I know full well how attracted I am to your dark side, just as the Angel in me is addicted to the shy and good girl that stands before me now.

A man learns with age, if he is lucky.

Man is nature as much as the trees.

The people say what they like and then I do what I like

It is the great triumph of genius to make the common appear novel.

We live in a country where power changes hands cyclically, because everybody in power screws up at some point, or the voters get fickle and just want a change.

There are many people who will stay in negative situation because it is familiar, rather than go where there is promise of something good, because that would be something unfamiliar

It is the characteristic of the most stringent censorships that they give credibility to the opinions they attack.