Quotes from Joseph Epstein

To be in the middle of composing a book is almost always to feel oneself in a state of confusion, doubt and mental imprisonment....

Bette Newboldt, our unappeasable feminist whom, I'm fairly certain, God Himself could not have made happy;

In Communist countries they take writers very seriously—so seriously that they often kill them.

The devil, of course, was totalitarianism, in particular fascism and Communism, which promised its adherents heaven and brought them unmitigated hell.

the Soviet experiment as "an absurd horror film stretching over 70 years." Government-organized famine, hideous show trials, brutal gulags, mass murder, life in the Soviet Union made the plagues that fell upon Egypt seem a week in the Catskills.

Donald Trump is worth I don't know how many millions, but his confident vulgarity will always keep him from being viewed as other than monstrously rich (perhaps more monster than rich), and if he were to be certified as upper class, many others put in that category would doubtless do what they could to find a new social class to fit into.

Reading is experience. A biography of any literary person ought to deal at length with what he read and when, for in some sense, we are what we read.

The English philosopher Michael Oakeshott notes that one of the signs of being cold today is that one knows what one doesn't have to know.

Without that strong personal presence, the essay doesn't quite exist; it becomes an article, a piece, or some other indefinable verbal construction.

College education is highly overrated. Take it from a man who dispensed it.

there is no faculty so weak as the English faculty," which is "the common catch-all for aspirants to the birch who are too lazy or too feeble in intelligence to acquire any sort of exact knowledge, and the professional incompetence of its typical ornament is matched only by his hollow cocksureness." In a passing reference to Emory University he mentions "the students there incarcerated.

In one of the papers he wrote for the All Souls fellowship, he referred to Rousseau's Confessions as "a lucid journal of a life so utterly degraded that it has been a bestseller in France ever since.

wasn't like today, when if you don't tell your kid you love him every twenty minutes you could go to jail for child abuse.

Vladimir Nabokov, contemning readers who identified with characters in fiction, remarked that the best readers identify with the artist.

that there are limitations to the Jewish response of humor when Jews today face murderous, humorless terrorists in the Middle East or the cowardly politicians of Europe seeking the votes of their increasingly Muslim electorates.

We are reminded of the court-parasites of the Roman Empire, of whom Juvenal wrote: the bad jokes of Fortune—village pierrots yesterday, arbiters of life and death today

Someone's going to drag me out of someplace feet-first, so it might as well be from my place of business. Besides, if I retire, what do you suggest I do, chase golf balls with the rest of the morons? Maybe I should take courses in Chinese stamp collecting or the history of Peru at Loch in Kop University downtown?

what's left of me if you take my work away? I'm not sure there's anything left." "Whaddya mean?

He was most alive at his business. He loved his wife, or thought he did. But did he miss Miriam? At first, yes, a lot, but by now days, whole weeks, went by when he didn't think about her.

Trevor-Roper never granted Waugh intellectual respect, but did acknowledge that in face-to-face confrontations he could not win, owing to Waugh's superior rudeness.

Being an anti-capitalist and hence being able to blame capitalism—often known more simply as "the system"—for any failure I might encounter through my own lack of talent or absence of energy not only provided me with a fine fallback position, but permitted me to view anyone who labored at a workaday job in the system with a rather lofty contempt.

If the novel is an instrument of discovery, what it sets out to discover are bits of that still unsolvable and greatest of all great mysteries, human nature.

Alongside the self-obsession they display and the victimhood they claim, current-day students often shout down speakers whose views they don't approve

I know how many days in which I have just answered e-mail, had three phone calls and a two hour lunch. Poof, gone. They are not infrequent.