Fashionably amusing table manners are a matter of breaking the right rule at the right time.

Good manners consist of doing precisely what everyone thinks should be done, especially when no one knows quite what that is.

A cocktail party is what you call it when you invite everyone you know to come over to your house at six p.m., put cigarettes out on your rug, and leave at eight to go somewhere more interesting for dinner without inviting you.

A debutante party is basically a bar mitzvah with sex in the parking lot. The same rules of egregious display, inedible food, and ridiculous expense are enforced.

In our popular mythology, the lower classes are decent, hardworking, and possessed of simple piety and common sense-as long as they stay downwind.

Rich white Protestant men have held on to some measure of power in America almost solely by getting women, blacks, and other disadvantaged groups to wear crippling foot fashions. This keeps them too busy with corns and bunions to compete in the job market.

Never refuse wine. It is an odd but universally held opinion that anyone who doesn't drink must be an alcoholic.

The wonder is that communism lasted so long. But then again, modern poetry lasted a long time, too.

Everything that's fun in life is dangerous. Horse races, for instance, are very dangerous. But attempt to design a safe horse and the result is a cow ... It is impossible to be alive and safe.

Marijuana is self-punishing. It makes you acutely sensitive, and in this world, what worse punishment could there be?