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 ….

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

You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together..

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….

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 ….

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

The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios - the overwhelming and underlying desire for something t….

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 alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that….

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

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings..

I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars..

Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners.

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..

After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so..

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….

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities..

Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: it's really our ….

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

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