The ingenuities we practice in order to appear admirable to ourselves would suffice to invent the telephone twice over on a rainy summer morning.

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

We must all face the fact that in a single lifetime we lead several simultaneous lives; our intention should be to make them reinforce one another instead of colliding.

The guns of the big events rumble through our pages, but the tiny firecrackers are constantly hissing and popping there as well; it appears that much of my life as a journalist has been devoted to sedulously setting off firecrackers.

It is in the nature of the New Yorker to be as topical as possible, on a level that is often small in scale and playful in intention.

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run.

To die quickly in one's eighth decade at the very top of one's powers is an enviable end, and not an occasion for mourning.