“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.”

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?

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.

Remember Killer Moth, the most ingenuous rogue ever to defy the dynamic duo, Batman and Robin ?

Another thing I find extremely eerie is that when people build a house, they almost exactly get it wrong. They don’t just get it partly wrong, they get it dead wrong.

That we don’t design agriculture to be sustainable is totally eerie. We design it to be a disaster, and of course, we get a disaster.

I lay there knowing something eerie ties us to the world of animals. Sometimes the animals pull you backward into it. You share hunger and fear with them like salt in blood.

It’s an eerie feeling, as if my old mentor is not just in the room, but in my shoes, using me as his mouthpiece.

The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable.