"Experience teaches you that the man who looks you straight in the eye, particularly if he adds a firm handshake, is hiding something."

"I tried to use the questions and answers as an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversation."

"Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking."

"The German mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest."

"By the end of high school I was not of course an educated man, but I knew how to try to become one."

"Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly."

"When you read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before."

"Cheese is milk's leap towards immortality."

"My main recollection is of the work I had to do in order to eat."

"As between mileage and experience choose experience."

"A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke - and that the joke is oneself."

"For most men, life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed."