“Someone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can’t say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment.”

Something is missing, we think. And so we long for the thing we’ve missed and can’t name, and out of that wanting – well, everything else rises, good and bad.

Americans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum

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.

Love is never stationary.

It was Mick Jagger’s idea.The other one was Simple Plan, based on a novel by Scott Smith. It’s a great book – really stark, not a comedy – about a guy who finds $4 million in a plane crash and decides to keep it.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

Everybody has to find out: who are you? What do you believe in?

He finds his fellow guilty of a skin Not color’d like his own, and having pow’r T’ enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey.

An Awakened person is someone who finds freedom in good fortune and bad.

One cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one’s soul.

Trying to find a buddha or enlightenment is like trying to grab space.