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

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

I try to turn a written thing, when I'm in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.

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.

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

The coffee shop is a great New York institution, but it has terrible coffee. And the more traditional coffee shops are trying to catch up with more sophisticated coffee drinkers.

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