I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.

Keep in mind that a language is both a map of the world and its own world, with its own shadowlands and crevasses - places where statements that seem to obey all the language's rules are nevertheless impossible to deal with.

It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.

[T]o really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.

I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that weird mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one exchange in one point of a high-level match is a nightmare of mechanical variables.

Happiness is not like we were walking around fingering razor blades or anything like that. But it just sort of seems as if - we sort of knew how happy our parents were, and we would compare our lives with our parents and see that, at least on the surface or according to the criteria that the culture lays down for a successful, happy life, we were actually doing better than a lot of them were.

The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’