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 think I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.

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

Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it; tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn't diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.

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.

Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: it's really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place - relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table.

I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.