Say what you will about him Ed Koch is still the best show in town.

It's odd being an American now. Most of us are peaceful, but here we are again, in our fifth major war of this century.

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.

Say what you will about him Ed Koch is still the best show in town.

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

What libraries give you is all three tenses - the past tense - the present tense in which we live and the future that we can only imagine. These places have teachers who are living and dead and we are lucky to have them. If I sit here and read Aristotle, he is speaking to me across a thousand years - more than a thousand years. That sense that I am in the company of the great greatest people who ever lived is a humbling experience but a liberating experience.