Television will enormously enlarge the eye's range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.

After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die.

Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.

The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition. (Written in 1949, 22 years before the World Trade Center was completed.)

A writer should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.

Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy.

Life's meaning has always eluded me and I guess always will. But I love it just the same.