“No animal should ever jump up on the dining room furniture unless absolutely certain that he can hold his own in the conversation.”

“polite conversation is rarely either”

“My favorite animal is steak.”

“This is not my favorite way to wake up. My favorite way to wake up is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at two thirty in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature I had better ring for breakfast. This occurs rather less often than one might wish.”

“It is not good form to take a Trick out unless one is so firmly established as to be able to afford being associated with someone who might at any given moment write a poem in public.”

“To me, nothing can be more important than giving children books, It's better to be giving books to children than drug treatment to them when they're 15 years old. Did it ever occur to anyone that if you put nice libraries in public schools you wouldn't have to put them in prisons?”

“Magazines all too frequently lead to books and should be regarded by the prudent as the heavy petting of literature.”