Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Once upon a time, a man named Fred Rogers decided that he wanted to live in heaven.
I collect songs because I want to control what I - what everybody within earshot - listens to.
I am the guilty gift-giver, which means that I am a gift-giver who lacks all sense of proportion.
But stories don't only speak; they are spoken to, by the circumstances under which they are written.
In a society in which the median age keeps advancing, we have no choice but to keep redefining youth.
I did not get into a fistfight with my father at my sister's wedding. My sister didn't have a wedding.
No one would call me a great cook, but over years of cooking, for me, confidence has replaced ambition.
Mark Zuckerberg is the product of Facebook just as surely as Facebook is the product of Mark Zuckerberg.
I don't play guitar. I sing. I'm the lead singer, of Cousin Billy. I also play harmonica, after a fashion.
I love many of the rock and rollers next up on altar of actuarial sacrifice more than I ever loved David Bowie.
Wearing a suit can seem like a somewhat archaic gesture, a concession to formality in a determinedly casual age.
You don't have to love cooking to cook, but you have to do more than love baking to bake. You have to bake out of love.
One of the great pleasures of reading Tom Wolfe - of still reading Tom Wolfe - is the sense of awe he consistently inspires.
By becoming the Twitter police we've volunteered to become the thought police: This seems indisputable, even uncontroversial.
I'd never met Philip Seymour Hoffman, never knew anyone who knew him, never even read a passably revealing magazine profile of him.
It is hard to decide whether Mark Zuckerberg is the most interesting boring person in the world or the most boring interesting one.
Of course, Google specializes in coming up with ideas, professes the highest ideals, and is dedicated to solving the world's problems.
It sounds lonely being Bob Dylan, because Bob Dylan likes being around other Bob Dylans, and there are not many other Bob Dylans around.
I have never baked. I have cooked thousands of meals big and small, but I have never cooked a cookie. I have never roasted a cake, or a pie.
For a long time, New Orleans was the classic-rock station of American cuisine, its reputation for flamboyance belying its playlist conservatism.
Storytellers all, we humans might run out of time even as we triumph over the problem of running out of space. But we will never run out of stories.
Cooking is, to me, the perfect fusion of generosity and selfishness, indeed the resolution of generosity and selfishness, the answer to my torn nature.
Music has always enhanced our experience of life on earth by seeming to give us access to something larger than ourselves - the strings of the universe.
Now, I love Israeli food, love 'Jerusalem: A Cookbook', love the homey exoticism, the fusion forged in the crucible of an eternally contested crossroads.
Music and television are turning into the equivalent of gymnastics and tennis: sports built entirely around the identification and training of prodigies.
And what makes Bob Dylan stories interesting is that the only person who can decide their outcome is Bob Dylan, so you never know how they're going to go.
I was not a fan. Moreover, I reveled in not being a fan, as though not being able to tolerate Robin Williams was one of the things by which I defined myself.
Our attention spans have become shorter because there are more and more claims upon them - more information, more complexity; more stories, more stuff; more.
I remember George Jones singing on television, but not any of the songs he sang. What I remember was my visceral reaction to him, the intensity of my distaste.
Bob Dylan is either the most public private man in the world or the most private public one. He has a reputation for being silent and reclusive; he is neither.
Like most people, I like to give what I like to get. Unlike most people, I still like to get what I got in college - books, magazine subscriptions, CDs, T-shirts.
The pit bull is not a breed but a conglomeration of traits, and those traits are reshaping what we think of as the American dog, which is to say the American mutt.
Food's not done until it yields something, maybe its soul or maybe just its secrets, and how long you're willing to wait for that to happen is a secret all your own.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, a man took off his jacket and put on a sweater. Then he took off his shoes and put on a pair of sneakers. His name was Fred Rogers.
We are trained to distinguish between journalism that's short and long, that's responsible and irresponsible, that stands for the right values and stands for the wrong.
The American middle class has always existed to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable: settled values with unsettled ones, social mobility with a sense of permanence.
We love football because the game of football is better than it has ever been, and is somehow managing to attain, at the same time, an apogee of opprobrium and excellence.
You learn a lot about America when you own a pit bull. You learn not just who likes your dog; you learn what kind of person likes your dog - and what kind of person fears him.
I never met Lou Reed, never was one of those journalists lucky enough to be the object of his derision, contempt, condescension, indifference, and occasional piercing honesty.
I have about 25,000 songs on my computer and play them mostly on shuffle, which means that the songs I've played the most are the songs that have been on my computer the longest.
The only restaurants in which you're actually happy to be served your entree are the restaurants that serve entrees ungarlanded by Chef's ambition - sushi joints and steakhouses.
I cook so that there is no absence. I cook so that I am always there, even when I'm gone, even when I die, and my cooking translates in my daughter's memory as, simply, this: time.
I always looked askance at Pandora and Spotify, regarding both as a passive means of experiencing music; they feed you music they presume you will like, and eventually you like it.
There is certainly no want of journalistic ambition among the purveyors of what is now called 'long-form,' nor of novelistic technique brought to bear on nonfiction, nor of outrage.
Ask people who know him for a description of Bob Dylan outside the prerogatives of fame and the obligations of art, and they have to stop and think; there's just not that much left.
That there is as yet no drug for immortality - or, for that matter, for muscle growth in the infirm - does not mean that immortality is theoretically or even technically impossible.
Conservatives still attack feminism with the absurd notion that it makes its adherents less attractive to men; in truth, it is feminism that has made forty-two-year-old women so desirable.
Now, I was one of those kids who grew up privy to both his parents' secrets, who acted as the intermediary between them and eased their estrangements: that was my function in the household.
We live in the golden age of character actors - in an age when actors who have done their time in character roles are frequently asked to carry dark movies and complicated television dramas.
I was a salesman just out of college, traveling all over American roads in the cause of selling handbags to stores that would in turn sell them to American women, not unlike my father had done.