Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.

Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.

How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?

Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.

Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.

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