It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
We are most alive when we're in love.
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant, of a teacher and a learner.
Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?
The thing about her is, she’s good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the soft way her belly looked. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things, they’re a different race. Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman’s good nature.
What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.
There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.
My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble.
I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to.
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
