Read, think well of mankind, go to our libraries and rejoice.
It's because even a good man can't always be right, that we need. . . rules.
I try to see the whole woman,' Eddie said to Hannah. 'Of course I recognize that she's old, but there are photographs - or the equivalent of photographs in one's imagination of anyone's life. A whole life, I mean. I can picture her when she was much younger than I am - because there are always gestures and expressions that are ingrained, ageless. An old woman doesn't see herself as an old woman, and neither do I. I try to see her her whole life in her. There's something so moving about someone's whole life.
Good habits are worth being fanatical about.
The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
My life is a reading list.
I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.
No man is disturbed by things, but by his opinion about things.
There is a man whose qualities can be savored by people who are getting old. . . The painter qualities are carried to the highest point in his work: what he does is done - through and through; when he paints eyes, they are lit with the fire of life.
The cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.
Decide what your currency is early. Let go of what you will never have. People who do this are happier and sexier.