I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast - you sort of can't skip it.

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.

We've had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants. The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don't think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.

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

The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it. The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.