“It is a good rule in life to be wary of the company of people who think of themselves in the third person, no matter how well justified they might seem to be in doing so.”

“Friedell caught the essential truth about people prone to catch-all theories: they aren’t in search of the truth, they’re in search of themselves.”

“Some people are different, and so are the rest of us.”

“She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.”

“Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.”

“Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.”

“Devotees who say that À la recherche du temps perdu reminds them of a cathedral should be asked which cathedral they mean. It reminds me of a sandcastle that the tide reached before its obsessed constructor could finish it; but he knew that would happen, or else why build it on a beach?”