English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.

I seldom went to bed before two or three o'clock in the morning, on the theory that if anything of interest were to happen to a young man it would almost certainly happen late at night.

Oh, I never look under the hood.

The circus comes as close to being the world in microcosm as anything I know; in a way, it puts all the rest of show business in the shade.

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.

Loneliness is a strange gift.

There is no trick to it. If you like to write and want to write, you write, no matter where you are or what else you are doing or whether anyone pays any heed.