“If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.”

“When ... asked what I am writing, I have answered, "A book about social class in America," ... It is if I had said, "I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals.”

“Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles.”

“The day after the British entered the war Henry James wrote a friend:The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness... is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.”

“i find nothing more depressing than optimism.”

“Another reason is that the letters are almost always funny, offering readers the spectacle of some pompous self-celebrator given ample ironic room in which to parade his self-solicited hurt.”

“Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.”