We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second..

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life..

Someone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can't say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment..

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

Cooking is the showy side of domesticity..

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….

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….

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

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

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….

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….

The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of p….

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….

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….

Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a….

I don't think there's any question journalists have become targets, but then I think that - that anyone who tries to practice liberty becomes a targe….

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..

Drawing is one of those things which sit on the uneasy bending line between instinct and instruction, where seeming perversity eventually trumps plea….