“It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.”

Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing.

I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.

There are as many attitudes to cooking as there are people cooking, of course, but I do think that cooking guys tend

You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of “I’s,” and a listening audience somehow turns each “I” into a “me.”

I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast – you sort of can’t skip it.

I think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.

The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.

The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios

Writing well isn’t just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in

The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is “South Park” – the hugely popular American cartoon show – and the things that the “South Park” creators have created, like “The Book Of Mormon,” the Broadway musical.

Making an idea into an emotion.

I think – the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.

Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share.

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?