My ambition was to embrace those general qualities that Ernest Hemingway, a former newspaperman, once said should be present in all good books: 'the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.'

In the end, the only thing the true New Yorker knows about New York is that it is unknowable.

The library is a place where most of the things I came to value as an adult had their beginnings.

The only way to fight nostalgia is to listen to somebody else's nostalgia

More than anything, it's a game of innocence. Politicians may come and go, but they always get booed at the ballpark.

For those without money, the road to the treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.

Frank Sinatra was the voice of the 20th-century American city.