The pose of innocence is as mandatory as the ability to eat banquet food and endure the scourging of the press.

Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character.

I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.

I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.

People may expect too much of journalism. Not only do they expect it to be entertaining, they expect it to be true.

The substitution of meaning accounts for the grasping of misers as well as the extravagance of spendthrifts. Karl Marx well understood this peculiar transformation of flesh into coin.

Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors.

The survival of American democracy depends less on the size of its armies than on the capacity of its individual citizens to rely... on the strength of their own thought.

It isn't money itself that causes the trouble, but the use of money as votive offering and pagan ornament.

America is about class. To pretend that it isn't is very ignorant. No society has ever existed without some kind of a ruling class.

Anti-utopianism continues to suffuse our culture...Today few imagine that society can be fundamentally improved, and those who do are seen as at best deluded, at worst threatening.

Judgments border on figurative cliffs that my pinky finger nudges to the floor of the infinite.

I thought I was going to be known for my humor. But then I had an idea for a story, which was absolutely not humorous. But, of course, that's the one that sells and becomes big.

A champion hates to lose even more than she loves to win.

Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.

The earth doesn't have a housekeeper to do the dusting.

In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.

Young men and fools sometimes bear pain they do not have to as a badge of their pride. Or their foolishness.

Whenever I see young girls wearing way too much makeup... you're young, you don't need that much.

The literature of disease is more interesting to me than all the healthy books.

The fascination of what's difficult Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent Spontaneous joy and natural content Out of my heart.