Since it is seldom clear whether intellectual activity denotes a superior mode of being or a vital deficiency, opinion swings between considering intellect a privilege and seeing it as a handicap.

The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.

Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.

Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about the past are a form of injustice.

Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.

It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.

Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.

Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea that keeps them whole.

The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.

Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.

Since it is seldom clear whether intellectual activity denotes a superior mode of being or a vital deficiency, opinion swings between considering intellect a privilege and seeing it as a handicap.

Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy.

If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.

A man who has both feet planted firmly in the air can be safely called a liberal as opposed to the conservative, who has both feet firmly planted in his mouth.

In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.

In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principal.

An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game - and do it by watching first some high school or small-town teams.

The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers.

If it were possible to talk to the unborn, one could never explain to them how it feels to be alive, for life is washed in the speechless real.

Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.

After being boxed in by man and his constructions in Europe and the East, the release into space is exhilarating. The horizon is a huge remote circle, and no hills intervene.

By the time I was 9, I had the conviction that everybody in the world was an artist except plumbers or people who delivered groceries.

I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.

In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.

It is only in the shadows, when some fresh wave, truly original, truly creative, breaks upon the shore, that there will be a rediscovery of the West.

Varese, Apollinaire, Ezra Pound, Leger, Gleizes, Severini, Villon, Duchamp, Duchamp-Villon, Marie Laurencin, Cocteau and many others were to me household names in the literal sense - names of familiar figures around the house.

Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.

The piano is the social instrument par excellence drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.

Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.

Time and rest are needed for absorption. Psychologists confirm that it is really in the summer that our muscles learn to skate and in the winter, how to swim.

I can remember the frustration of not being able to talk. I knew what I wanted to say, but I could not get the words out, so I would just scream.

What I try to do for my readers is to pass on some of the things that I found out about being thirteen after doing it for forty years.

In this watering-place I acted an heroic character, badly studied; and being a novice on such a stage, I forgot my part before a pair of lovely blue eyes.

Young people discovering their sexuality must know they walk with a strong tradition and that they are not alone. They have a right to information without being pressured.

Being a publicist is like management in a lot of ways - you're their friend, you're their mother, you're their confidante.

I mean, all alternative comedy is are comedians that have being doing it for so long, for so long, that they were relaxed enough to start becoming personal on stage.

I became hooked on the idea of being able to shoot an image and process it myself, and end up with a product.

Being a cover artist is not like being a real artist. That's just copying what someone else did.

It is too maddening. I've got to fly off, right now, to some devilish navy yard, three hours in a seasick steamer, and after being heartily sick, I'll have to speak three times, and then I'll be sick coming home. Still, who would not be sick for England?

I don't like being recognised, I have no interest in being famous at all, I just do what I do. If I could be like Captain Kirk and beam myself up and then beam myself down, I would!

I'm glad I'm not Brezhnev. Being the Russian leader in the Kremlin. You never know if someone's tape recording what you say.

Being a musician is what I do, but it's not what I am.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.

We've had it very clear to the Bosnians that our obligation to equip and train their forces is completely conditional on the foreign forces being gone.

My parents were amazing people who had no business being together - and they knew it.

Teachers started recognizing me and praising me for being smart in science and that made me want to be even smarter in science!

Sure, I get the blues. But what I try to do, is apply joy to the blues, you know? I don't know if it's a technique, or just being bent that way, being raised by the folks I was raised by.