Occupation: Writer Birth: August 24, 1956
In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections..
The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios - the overwhelming and underlying desire for something t….
Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers….
Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that….
Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities..
Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adher….
What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity..
Wit and puns aren't just décor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in it….
We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second..
The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped..
We've had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants. The trick an….
The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that ….
You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together..
Writing doesn't come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency, I think - the more senten….
Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our s….
Americans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum; the reality is that the….
In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in ….
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life..
Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper..
All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your v….
What we eat is the one simplest way to declare who we are - the table reflects our values with a clarity that few other theaters of human behaviour p….