34 quotes
People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.
So far as I could make out, what writers did couldn't even be classified as work.
Growing Up (1982)
The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality.
There's a Country in My Cellar (1990)
It seems to be a law of American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.
Unaware of history's higher significance, I slumbered through the bliss of infancy, feeling no impulse whatever to make something of myself.
Growing Up (1982)
Watergate left Washington a city ravaged by honesty.
So This Is Depravity (1980)
In America nothing dies easier than tradition.
Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.
Life seemed to be an educator's practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong.
There's a Country in My Cellar (1990)
Long words, fat talk — they may tell us something about ourselves. Has the passion for fat in the language increased as self-confidence has waned?
So This Is Depravity (1980)
The young cult of sociology, needing a language, invented one. There are many dead languages, but the sociologists' is the only language that was dead at birth.
So This Is Depravity (1980)
New York is the only city in the world where you can get deliberately run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.
I frankly admit to not knowing who I am. This is why I refuse to buy clothes that will tell people who I want them to think I am.
So This Is Depravity (1980)
Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity there is no parent left to tell them.
Growing Up (1982)
The cruel law of life is that a solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems than you have to.
Americans treat history like a cookbook. Whenever they are uncertain what to do next, they turn to history and look up the proper recipe, invariably designated "the lesson of history."
So This Is Depravity (1980)
Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product.
At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim cosmic joke.
Growing Up (1982)
The Democratic Party's favorite hobbies are winning, Texas and exhaustion.