Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.
I don't miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
I think I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast - you sort of can't skip it.
Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
I think that we're always drawn - particularly sophisticated people - are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship
New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.
I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 alive.
What we eat is the one simplest way to declare who we are - the table reflects our values with a clarity that few other theaters of human behaviour posses.
Wit and puns aren't just décor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.
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 target of fanatics.
Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.
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 adherents in private.
The coffee shop is a great New York institution, but it has terrible coffee. And the more traditional coffee shops are trying to catch up with more sophisticated coffee drinkers.
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 tell the story or make the argument.
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 purpose and legendary lightness of touch.
Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing.
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 values to see that they are a little bit absurd.
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 be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World
Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don't exist...
Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.
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 chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games.
Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions - adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers - none can equal the Internet.
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 wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting.
Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers, I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
Drawing is one of those things which sit on the uneasy bending line between instinct and instruction, where seeming perversity eventually trumps pleasure as the card players and the kibitzers interact and new thrills are sought.
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 reader might share. You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs.
