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

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation. Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.