Gore Vidal

One can never rely on the great keeping one's letters; and should those letters vanish, one is apt to be remembered only as the mysterious half of a dialogue to be reconstructed in the vaguest way from the surviving (and sometimes lesser!) half of the exchange.

...because academics everywhere are forever attacking one another, and I had long since learned that one must never believe what a teacher says of another.

We are all so simple at heart that we become unfathomable to one another.

Men are odd. If they cannot be first, they don't in the least mind being last.