It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.

Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.

[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

Throw yourself into the convulsions of the world. I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't believe progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it, to look at it, to witness it. Try and get it. Seize the moment.

I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.

In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.