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

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

The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present. If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.

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

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.

Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs.

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