America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy.

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

Terror is now the world narrative, unquestionably. When those two buildings were struck, and when they collapsed, it was, in effect, an extraordinary blow to consciousness, and it changed everything.

The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.

He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.

Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into the night, if you stand a while and look.

Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential; it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity.