Occupation: Writer Birth: August 24, 1956
New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them..
If you're being attacked from all sides, it's possible you're doing something right; it's also possible that you are doing everything wrong..
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….
Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin….
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….
I don't miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy..
Big writers become a kind of shared climate..
Cooking is the showy side of domesticity..
Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners.
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….
Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions - adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of ….
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 ….
Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, ….
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….
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….
I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast - you sort of can't skip it..
Drawing is one of those things which sit on the uneasy bending line between instinct and instruction, where seeming perversity eventually trumps plea….
If we are willing to act violently in pursuit of a peripheral interest, everyone can be certain that, when a vital interest is at stake, we will be s….
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..
Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that..
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….