“I think if journalists start doing that then they won’t be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won’t be practicing satire.”

I am a guilty party here – to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores.

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.

YOU have no room to laugh, that’s all. I’m not doing any worse with Boovish than you did with English.’

So you’re doing that the first two or three screenings, and then finally, you dial the movie in and it’s working, and at that point, it’s 50/50 as far as what’s funny and what’s working.

Its not about earning a paycheck, its about doing something good that you believe in.

Eventually, they’ll just go away, because you will make them sad. That’s something I’ve proven quite adept at doing over the years.

The unexamined life is not worth living. But if all you’re doing is examining, then you’re not living!

If ‘everything happens for a reason,’ then every act of evil is ultimately God’s doing.

I started tapping and I was okay. Then after about two years my feet knew what they were doing!

It’s really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place – relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table.