Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.

Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality.

Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.

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

It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.

New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.