The world isn't going backward, if you can just stay young enough to remember what it was really like when you were really young.

Chicago seems a big city instead of merely a large place.

People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.

News is like the tilefish which appears in great schools off the Atlantic Coast some years and then vanishes, no one knows whither or for how long. Newspapers might employ these periods searching for the breeding grounds of news, but they prefer to fill up with stories about Kurdled Kurds or Calvin Coolidge, until the banks close or a Hitler marches, when they are as surprised as their readers.

It is an anomaly that information, the one thing most necessary to our survival as choosers of our own way, should be a commodity subject to the same merchandising rules as chewing gum.

Any city may have one period of magnificence, like Boston or New Orleans or San Francisco, but it takes a real one to keep renewing itself until the past is perennially forgotten.

An Englishman teaching an American about food is like the blind leading the one-eyed.