Sometimes with 'The New Yorker,' they have grammar rules that just don't feel right in my mouth.

The only real advice you can give anyone is to keep writing.

I go to the movies at least five times a week, and after a while everything becomes a blur to me.

“This is hurting me a lot more than it’s hurting you,” he said. It was his standard line, but I knew that this time he was right. Worse than the boil was the stuff that came out of it. What got to me, and got to him even worse, was the stench, which was unbearable, and unlike anything I had come across before. It was, I thought, what evil must smell like - not an evil person but the wicked ideas that have made him that way. How could a person continue to live with something so rotten inside? And so much of it!

The Korean man nodded, the way you do when you’re a foreigner and understand that someone has finished a sentence.

I don't like being left to my own thoughts.

If finding an apartment is like falling in love, buying one is like proposing on your first date and agreeing not to see each other until the wedding.