“How could anything non-controversial be of intellectual interest to grown-ups?”

“To forget a friend is sad. Not every one has had a friend. And if I forget him, I may become like the grown−ups who are nolonger interested in anything but figures..”

“Intellectual controversies tend to be like dog fights without the teeth, in which the barking not the biting does the damage.”

“Controversial' as we all know, is often a euphemism for 'interesting and intelligent.”

“I was utterly convinced that an intellectual could never be anything but an intellectual, was simply not capable of being anything else, that his intellectuality would, sooner or later, erode his faith or erode whatever he'd masked it with . . . For example, intellectuals like to dress themselves up as peasants . . . but it never works. The intellectual's constitution is impervious to such things - it permits only one object of worship - oneself. Generally speaking, an intellectual in the contemporary version is an exceptionally resourceful and, essentially, pitiful being.”

“We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.”