If you are old enough to feel angst about how a holiday “feels, ” you are very likely no longer in the target demographic.

Eating should be an act of physical necessity or emotional joy, not something to alleviate boredom.

We paw at nostalgia even before we hit twenty, wanting a holiday that never happened, a wholesomeness that could not survive in the wild.

Students view any teacher who does not bury them under work as some sort of mentally impaired kitten to be kicked aside.

My Christmas was a sum total of the ministrations of adults, usually adults who wanted me to encourage my parents to buy something for me to consume and discard.

The effect of overworking

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations.

Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror.

My responsibility, our responsibility as lucky Americans, is to try to give back to this country as much as it has given us, as we continue our American journey together.

you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead.

Burgundy makes you think of silly things; Bordeaux makes you talk about them, and Champagne makes you do them.

I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatise that private world.

Let my epitaph be, "Here lies Joseph, who failed in everything he undertook."

I am too old to have ever been very worried about what "genre" any given book of mine might be. I read everything. I am easily amused.

There is not a single celebrated Southern name in any of the departments of human industry except those of war, assassination, lynching, murder, the duel, repudiation, & massacre.