Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was th….

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 ….

I try to turn a written thing, when I'm in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to te….

The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be ali….

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….

Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners.

The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have i….

In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections..

The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter ….

Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship.

Cooking is the showy side of domesticity..

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness ….

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, ….

Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense..

Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking..

When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being i….

Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat..

New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them..

Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as th….

We don't know that we've lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence. Something is missing, we think. And so we lon….

There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to a….