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.

Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.

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

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.

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 my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

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.