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     "Many genuine philosophers smoke pipes. The reason is probably self-evident: if you are asked a really awkward question, or are otherwise put on the spot, all you have to do is take the pipe out of an inside pocket (you will find that this makes the inside pocket particularly disgusting after a few days: but bluffers must suffer for their art, like everyone else), after making some preliminary remark such as: "Well, the really important thing about that seems to me at least to be", and set about lighting it.
     You can make this operation last five minutes with no difficulty, and much longer with practice, and provided you interject the occasional comment of an entirely non-committal nature as you knock, clean, scrape, blow through, dismantle, reassemble, load, pack, tamp, light, draw on, re-light, re-tamp, draw on again, and emit large and noxious clouds of smoke from the pipe, no one will suspect that you are playing for time. Do this well enough, and you can avoid having to answer the question at all.
     Other props and social tics ... have their uses, but none of them beats the pipe, which also manages for some reason to make whoever is smoking it look knowledgeable."

Jim Hankinson
Bluff Your Way in Philosophy (Ravette Publishing, 1985)