Flattery is a challenge. The proper turning away from it, undercutting, diminishing it without offense or vehemence, is a social grace sweeter even than the swift determination to keep ahead in the race of hospitality.

I am alone here in New York, no longer a we.

Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy.

The language of the younger generation has the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power at hand, not to come. It is military, theatrical, and at its most coherent probably a lasting repudiation of empty courtesy and bureaucratic euphemism.

Memory - the very skin of life.

When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.

Gossip, or, as we gossips like to say, character analysis.