“For all the years I’d spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I”

Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners

Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

Drawing is one of those things which sit on the uneasy bending line between instinct and instruction, where seeming perversity eventually trumps pleasure as the card players and the kibitzers interact and new thrills are sought.

When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive.

Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.

That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.

Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this:

The blankness invites scribbling on, mental drawing , and the best feeling I know – apart from the more obvious sensual ones – is the feeling of putting down the first thought and seeing it turn into symbols.

Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .

In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.

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.

I have no idea what the U.S. intends to do further there and what would be the reaction of the Iraqi people.

I didn’t mind the quiet stretches. It was like we were trying out the idea of being side by side.

In athletics, the idea of possibility is presumed. It’s not ‘if;’ it’s ‘how.’

I think diversity in television is important. It’s not about trying to fill a quota or satisfy some idea of diversity.

One of the things I’ve really gotten past in the last couple of years is the idea of being made uncomfortable by the way things appear, rather than how things are.

Maybe [success] is because I’m in China and I’m more open. Maybe it’s my independent behavior, or because I participated in certain projects. I have no idea.

I think art certainly is the vehicle for us to develop any new ideas, to be creative, to extend our imagination, to change the current conditions.

These are nonviolent people who have lost their freedom simply because they expressed their ideas….In truth, they are heroes of our time.