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….

For me, the beauty of the blank page, or empty screen,staring up at nine thirty after two cups of coffee and a deep breath remains unique. The blankn….

Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions - adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of ….

Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wor….

I think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so w….

Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper..

Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side….

Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin….

I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast - you sort of can't skip it..

Writing well isn't just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say i….

... a fact about photography: we can look at people's faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for e….

The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that ….

Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that..

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….

There are as many attitudes to cooking as there are people cooking, of course, but I do think that cooking guys tend - I am a guilty party here - to ….

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..

Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind..

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a po….

The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present. If we had b….

American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to ….

The coffee shop is a great New York institution, but it has terrible coffee. And the more traditional coffee shops are trying to catch up with more s….