Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent.

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.

It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.

If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you'll never make it.

Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.

At four o'clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.