“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.

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.

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.

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.

She does not want to feel even the faintest temptation to call his mobile number, as she had done obsessively for the first year after his death so she could hear his voice on the answering service.

There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.

I quit high school the first day of 10th grade because I felt like I was wasting time.

My mother was my first jealous lover.

I sang for my family. And I think probably the first time I sang and got paid for it, I was about 6 or 7.

A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand.

When one first seeks the truth, one separates oneself from it.

That’s not an accident that Donald Trump didn’t begin with, say, trade or jobs or anything, that he actually began by otherizing the first African-American president of the United States.