“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.”

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.

Credibility’ is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we’ll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one.

Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.

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.

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

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.

Youth has many glories, but judgement is not one of them, and no amount of electronic amplification can turn a belch into an aria.