“The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don’t think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.”

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

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

The light in your eyes shines because of the longing in your soul. And the longing in your souls rises because you are looking for the lost half minute.

That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.

The reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.

I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.

Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic.

Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers

All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.

We don’t know that we’ve lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence.

Wit and puns aren’t just décor in the mind; they’re essential signs that the mind knows it’s on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.

The coffee shop is a great New York institution, but it has terrible coffee. And the more traditional coffee shops are trying to catch up with more sophisticated coffee drinkers.

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

For a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.

Fanaticism in religion is the alliance of the passions she condemns with the dogmas she professes.

Monarchy hardens into despotism. Aristocracy contracts into oligarchy. Democracy expands into the supremacy of numbers.

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

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

I think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so we should back down from them.