“The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios”

You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.

Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.

There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it.

You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.

I don’t think there’s any question journalists have become targets, but then I think that – that anyone who tries to practice liberty becomes a target of fanatics.

Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.

Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship

Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.

If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.

Would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

Someone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can’t say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment.

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.

Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions – adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers – none can equal the Internet.

I try to turn a written thing, when I’m in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.

What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

I’m getting to the place where I can sort of go through airports now and there’s no hysteria. I can go places alone even. But at the same time, if you get in trouble, you can find somebody in your age group who might recognize you.

I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person.

On stage, we just want to generate hysteria. We don’t care about looking cool or posing.

Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society’s hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.