Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down.

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.

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.

I am always humbled by the infite ingenuity of the Lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow.

Oh, I never look under the hood.

Just to live in the country is a full-time job. You don't have to do anything. The idle pursuit of making a living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.

The terror of the atom age is not the violence of the new power but the speed of man's adjustment to it, the speed of his acceptance.