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….

A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is "South Park" - the hugely popular American cartoon show - and the things that the "South Park" crea….

Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners.

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

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….

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

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

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

I think I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write..

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..

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….

I think that we're always drawn - particularly sophisticated people - are always drawn to the idea of simplicity..

Big writers become a kind of shared climate..

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….

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..

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 ….

What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity..

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….

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

Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers….

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….