“I try to turn a written thing, when I’m in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.”

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.

Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow?

If I were a devout Mormon, I would be offended by a lot of things that go on in “The Book Of Mormon,” right?

New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.

Of having seen something large and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason.

Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.

The overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about – was still startling.

Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:

If you’re being attacked from all sides, it’s possible you’re doing something right; it’s also possible that you are doing everything wrong.

That they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up

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.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.

The basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.

We’ve had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants.

What we eat is the one simplest way to declare who we are – the table reflects our values with a clarity that few other theaters of human behaviour posses.

I’ve never spoken to Bon Iver, but I would love to. I’m a huge fan!

The truth is deafening, no matter how softly it is spoken.

As a boy, I believed freedom for America meant freedom for me. There was a time I believed every word spoken.

Often ironic and self-deprecating – are always spoken that take on other meanings when uttered by others.

Words spoken cannot be recalled, and many a man and many a woman who has spoken a word at once regretted, are far too proud to express that regret.

He could hardly read or write but his heart spoke the language of the good

It is quite possible that an animal has spoken to me and that I didn’t catch the remark because I wasn’t paying attention.

It is easy to sympathize at a distance,’ said an old gentleman with a beard. ‘I value more the kind word that is spoken close to my ear.