New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.

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.

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

You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.

Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.

The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.