I am afraid that as people grow old there is a tendency for them to believe that what the past *ought* to have been it was.

Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself moral.

We do not want to old to be sharper than we. It is bad enough that they were there first, and got the best things.

...Leggett feels that to be excitingly right in general is better than to be dully accurate in particular. That is why he is such an effective journalist.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Nothing great ever happens from thinking small.

There is no other escape like a book. Reading expands your mind and opens your world to a myriad of possibilities.

For what one has to learn to do, we learn by doing.

There are two things in New York, euphoria and disaster.

Perhaps no mightier conflict of mind occurs ever again in a lifetime than that first decision to unseat one's own tooth.

How clerks love refusing. It salves them for being clerks.

To be the name on somebody's shirt that they've made themselves in preparation for one of your shows - it doesn't get much cooler than that.

What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.

Your conscious life is an elaborate after-the-fact rationalization of things you really do for other reasons.