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.

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.

Lives of great men oft remind us as we o'er their pages turn, That we too may leave behind us - Letters that we ought to burn.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

I get letters from readers who say that they have always hated reading, but somebody suggested one of my books, they actually finished the book and enjoyed it, and they're going on to read another book. I'm thrilled that they have figured out that reading is fun.

I like the storytelling and reading the letters, the long-distance dedications. Anytime in radio that you can reach somebody on an emotional level, you're really connecting.

Out all of these zillions of letters, one of the first ones that came was, as it turned out from Johnny Carson within the last five or six weeks of his life. I had worked with him. He lost a son who had worked for me.

I started getting letters from college in the tenth grade.

You know these love letters mix with whisky, just don't light a match when you kiss me.

Writings scatter to the winds blank checks in an insane charge. And were they not such flying leaves, there would be no purloined letters.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.

I have asked myself once or twice lately what was my natural bent. I have no doubt at all: It is to look at each day for the evil of that day and have a go at it, and that is why I have never failed to have an acute interest in each morning's letters.

Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season. All great men of letters have therefore been enthusiastic walkers.

Aside from sales, the letters from readers have been primarily positive.

Judging from the letters I've received from obviously feeble-minded persons who wish I would write another These Old Shades, it ought to sell like hot cakes.

There are people who would rather choke than go see my movies. They write me letters all the time.

When I first began to combine letters other than Hebrew, I read every book in German that came my way, and from these I certainly received according to the nature of my soul.

When an actor has money, he doesn't send letters, but telegrams.

Writers spend three years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet. It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day.

To be a philosophical sceptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential to being a sound, believing Christian.

More negatives write than call. It's a cheap shot for me to go on the air with the critical letters or E-mail I get because the reaction of the listeners is always an instantaneous expression of sympathy for me and contempt for the poor critic.

I had never thought of myself as a dramatist, and, for really good technical results, the thought came too late: a man of letters has become too wordy to write economically for the stage.