In recompense, envy may be the subtlest - perhaps I should say the most insidious - of the seven deadly sins.

By the way, the secret of speaking French is confidence. Whether you are right or wrong, you don't hesitate.

I know how deeply slothful I am.

We know the ideal isn't where the action is.

Culture means, I think, that you have widened your experience enough through reading and through being a little bit thoughtful about these things that it has changed your outlook in some ways. And not necessarily made you a better human being but made you see things.

My wife who is non-Jewish regrets it all the time that I can say these terrible things about fellow Jews and she can't.

Not to like ice cream is to show oneself uninterested in food.

I am the heterosexual Truman Capote.

I know how many days in which I have just answered e-mail, had three phone calls and a two hour lunch. Poof, gone. They are not infrequent.

I think the story is my form.

I am married to someone I love.

Envy is never general, but always very particular - at least envy of the kind one feels strongly.

I know from the middle distance I give off the look of being prolific, which is a funny compliment to receive.

I am basically a complainer and all the grounds for complaint have been swept out from under me.

One of the pleasures of being a Jew, I don't have to tell you, it allows you anti-Semitism.

The pleasure of jogging and running is rather like that of wearing a fur coat in Texas in August: the true joy comes in being able to take the damn thing off.

In recompense, envy may be the subtlest - perhaps I should say the most insidious - of the seven deadly sins.

The decisive moment in the defeat of upper class, capital-S, Society may have come when, in newspapers all over the nation, what used to be call the Society page was replaced by the Style section.

I just know so many people who have six or seven foreign languages and have read everything and have musical training and they are still dorks.

One serious drawback about letters is that, in order to get them, one must send some out. When it comes to the mail, I feel it is better to receive than to give.

I myself think anti-Semitism is about envy.

No one has really ever defined what a friend is.

I should prefer to die laughing, and, on more than one occasion, thought I might.

Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.

A cat is the only domestic animal I know who toilet trains itself and does a damned impressive job of it.

The pleasure of jogging and running is rather like that of wearing a fur coat in Texas in August: The true joy comes in being able to take the damn thing off.

The reason 'closure' is a cliche is that it is used too often, too imprecisely, and doesn't in any case reflect reality. In reality, such closure in broken friendships and much else in life is rarely achieved; only death brings closure and then not always for those still living.

Snobbishness is the desire for what divides men and the inability to value what unites them.

Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope.

Envy like fire always makes for the highest points.

Far less envy in America than in France, and far less wit.

Envy is an insult to oneself.

With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some books, I live without envy.

Exploiting people's emotions of fear, envy and anxiety is not hope, it's not change, it's partisanship. We don't need partisanship. We don't need demagoguery, we need solutions.

Only fools live in the past or carry envy to the present.

Pride, which inspires us with so much envy, is sometimes of use toward the moderating of it too.

On every movie I've done as a director, I look at the producers and having done it, I don't envy them, at all.

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

Moral indignation in most cases is, 2% moral, 48% indignation, and 50% envy.

It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered.

Envy is the art of counting the other fellow's blessings instead of your own.

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.

I don't work a five-day week as a rule, and I've managed to fill that time up. It hasn't been that hard. I volunteer at school. I'm working because I love it. Yet, I don't not envy women who have a stay-at-home job, because you miss stuff.

On the one hand, people think they own kids; they feel that they have the right to tell the kids what to do. On the other hand, people envy kids. We'd like to be kids our whole lives. Kids get to do what they do. They live on their instincts.

In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.

I envy people who can just look at a sunset. I wonder how you can shoot it. There is nothing more grotesque to me than a vacation.

Skating takes up 70 percent of my time, school about 25 percent. Having fun and talking to my friends, 5 percent. It's hard. I envy other kids a lot of things, but I get a guilt trip when I'm not training.

The flower which is single need not envy the thorns that are numerous.

When I went to Philadelphia I was 26 years old and really sitting on top of the world. Family life, a professional career, plenty of friends and associates, and a good reputation, a wish list that could be the envy of many.