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.

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

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

I don't miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.

In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.

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

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