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

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

I think that we're always drawn - particularly sophisticated people - are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.

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

There are as many attitudes to cooking as there are people cooking, of course, but I do think that cooking guys tend - I am a guilty party here - to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores.

In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.

Wit and puns aren't just décor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.