The world likes humor, but it treats it patronizingly. It decorates its serious artists with laurel, and its wags with Brussels sprouts.

Advice from this elderly practitioner is to forget publishers and just roll a sheet of copy paper into your machine and get lost in your subject.

The vision of milk and honey, it comes and goes. But the odor of cooking goes on forever.

The world organization debates disarmament in one room and, in the next room, moves the knights and pawns that make national arms imperative.

Never hurry and never worry!

Writing is not an exercise in excision, it's a journey into sound.

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.