Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.

The muttered hint, "Remember, you have a stroke here," freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.

The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.

Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments.

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.