I can talk to anybody but when it comes to somebody that I like, then I turn into like this five-year-old kindergartener in a sandbox.
Category Archive: 1930
He has the obligation to society that any human being has. I don’t think a satirist has any greater obligation to society than a bricklayer or anybody else.
My background did not start with the East Side; it started with Greenwich Village, which is West Side.
The judge said I was a menace to society because I had put crime on a scientific basis.
These critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all, to moderate.
No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn’t understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.
What you’ve got to say, you say.
I think if I hadn’t become a sociologist, I would have become very anti-intellectual.
The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency – the belief that the here and now is all there is.
Jazz is very important. It’s not something I can put my finger on. When I’m writing at my favorite time, I like to have the gentle side of Coltrane or Brubeck on the CD player. It creates sort of a spiritual space in which I write best.