Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting.

Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions - adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers - none can equal the Internet.

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

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

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

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.

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.